The Nuclear Option
by LeviTamm
Summary: Orimura Ichika discovered at a young age that he was little bit... different from the other children. It had been a total accident. A fluke. And due to the way he discovered this, he almost felt as if he had cheated God. Fearing what his sister would do if she found out, he kept his mouth shut about it, and told no one... Then he learned he could pilot an IS. Minor AU.
1. Chapter 1: Revelations

**Disclaimer: I don't own Infinite Stratos in any sense.**

**A/N: **

**Hi. **

**So I'm trying a bit of an experiment with some of my stories. Whether it's a good idea or not remains to be seen. But here's how it works. I have a Discord server which I'll link below. On this server, I have links to the Google Docs versions of all of the chapters in this story with the permissions set up to allow anyone to suggest edits and comment. This means that you can highlight and comment on specific points in the text. **

**If you come across a part of this story that doesn't feel right or could be made better somehow, and you are willing to spend a moment or two to explain your idea, feel free to point it out. If you make a suggestion, and I accept it, I'll credit your username with the change at the bottom of the chapter along with a quick line summarizing the change you made. (Unless you want to remain anonymous. In this case, there will be no name present next to the change.) Any sort of comment though is fine. If you just want to talk about a specific paragraph or line, since this site doesn't allow that functionality with the current review system, you can do it this way.**

**I'll periodically re-post the older chapters of this story as they evolve over time. This story is sort of in the midst of a transformation, so you will likely come across moments where the writing style changes, or is inconsistent with the other chapters. This is especially true earlier on. **

**If you want to just hang out and talk about anything, Discord is also the way to go. Especially for longer, detailed conversations. I've lost track of plenty of reviews and PM's, and I am much more active there than here.**

**This is the link: A3dTszc**

**\- LeviTamm**

* * *

Chifuyu Orimura stared at the newsfeed on her smartphone in utter disbelief.

She almost never kept up with the news. She was almost always way too busy. But at the moment, she had literally nothing better to do. So she had taken to rifling through all of the unused applications and features that had come preinstalled on her phone in the meantime.

She had never gone through them all before, and as bored as she was, she didn't have the time to go off and do something she may have actually enjoyed doing instead. So, due to the way her schedule for the day worked out, she was stuck basically waiting for her next obligation, but did not have the time to go anywhere while she was.

So she had decided to just waste some time doing this in the meantime.

One of these apps of hers that she had found, compiled all of the top trending news stories from all around the world. She had opened this app, and had glanced through a few of these articles, mostly just reading the headlines.

Then she had froze upon reading one, very specific one. And she had so many questions now.

Generally speaking, she was not someone who could be surprised by anything so easily, but this time things were different because it directly concerned her brother.

He had made the news.

_'Billionaire Orimura Ichika Launches Asteroid Mission!'_ was splayed across her screen in giant, bold letters. And there was a picture of a rocket launching in the background.

When she had seen this for the first time only a few moments ago, her brain had practically shut down.

Because: _'What the absolute fuck?'_

Was this real?

Not a single word in that headline had made sense to her.

Now, she may not have spent all that much time with her brother recently, mostly due to her recent obligations in Germany, but she had at least assumed that she had a decent grasp on what he got up to in his spare time.

Evidently, she knew almost nothing about him at all. And upon actually reading beyond the headline of the article, things got even stranger.

Apparently, her brother owned an asteroid mining company and had just launched a mineral prospecting mission to a nearby asteroid. Right on the back of an Orimura Rocket. Because the Orimura's made the finest, most capable rockets in the entire world. Apparently.

This was certainly the first time she heard about it.

Wasn't he only 15? Where was he finding all the time to do this? How did he do all of this without her ever knowing about it? The public and the media knew more about her brother than she did.

Chifuyu leaned back in her chair and stared blankly at the ceiling of the room trying to wrap her mind around all of these new revelations.

Vaguely, she remembered having a conversation with her brother about a year and a half ago that had entailed him asking her for permission to start a business. He had been a minor at the time, and had been essentially road blocked from doing anything of the sort because of it.

The laws hadn't been on his side due to his age. He needed to be 18 to be able to do everything he wanted to on his own, so Ichika had asked her to sign a few pieces of paper for him that would essentially give him legal permission.

She would basically be a co-owner in name only in whatever he did. Which meant that legally, whenever Ichika's age would come into question, he could wriggle out of any trouble by pointing to her and the fact that she was over 18. And since she was technically a co-owner, her brother would be legally protected, even if she had never directly intervened in anything he had ever done.

She could literally just sit back and let him do whatever he wanted and never have to do any work. Which was mostly why she had agreed in the first place. She simply didn't have the time to actually oversee what her brother was doing, or to help him out. So she just existed as a name on paper to offer him a loophole to get out of any legal trouble.

She hadn't thought much about it at the time. She had figured that maybe it would be a learning experience for him and that it would at least keep him busy when she wasn't around, so she had signed off on it. It had only taken her about 5 minutes or so for her to read all the paperwork required. Ichika had streamlined the process for her so that she could spend the absolute minimum amount of time necessary to help him out.

Just 5 minutes was all that her brother had asked of her. Just two signatures and a cursory scan over a single page document to make sure that her brother wasn't overlooking anything. And then she could completely forget about it. Leaving it entirely in his hands.

And that's what she had done. Thinking to herself that he'd probably create some small business to begin saving up some money for his future education or something. Something like what the Gotanda family had. A small family business that provided enough income to live comfortably.

She had clearly underestimated his ambition.

Her brother had become a multi-billionaire in less than two years, and had started launching rockets out into the solar system. It distinctly reminded her of her friend Tabane, and not in a good way. Chifuyu was definitely going to need to check to see if that lunatic had anything to do with this.

* * *

There had always been a reason why Chifuyu had practically abandoned her brother at every turn. It wasn't because she didn't like him, or because she wanted to teach him independence, or anything of the sort. It was, perhaps ironically, due to the fact that she needed to protect him. And due to the nature of her and her brother's circumstances, she could only do that from a distance.

So while she had always loved him more than anything else in the world, ever since she had first laid eyes on him on the day of his birth, she could never allow herself to stand by his side until she completed one very specific goal.

To get strong.

How strong?

She needed to get so unbelievably strong that in a hypothetical scenario where all the world's militaries joined forces along with every other IS pilot in existence, and they all ganged up on her and her alone, she needed to be strong enough to win that battle.

Strong enough to not just be considered number one, but to be strong enough to beat literally everyone else, all at once. Strong enough so that the only threat to her was Tabane Shinonono herself. Who she happened to be close friends with, and who would never turn on her or Ichika for any reason.

And this was why she always left Ichika on his own. So she could spend every spare moment of her life developing her skills.

It was wrong. She knew it was. And some part of her hated herself for doing it, but she didn't have much choice either. If it were up to her, she and her brother Ichika would have been living an ordinary life together in peace, all this time.

But that just wasn't an option. It had never been an option because of their mother. Chifuyu knew that if her mother had had her way all those years ago, she'd be dead right now, and Ichika would be under her thumb. She couldn't allow that to happen, so she had to get stronger. Strong enough to protect Ichika against anything. Against their mother, and against the entire world if it came to that.

So she had to train.

Her friend Tabane had given her the tool that she needed to keep him safe. The IS. But as good of a pilot as she was, she still was not satisfied. She felt that she had still not mastered it, and could feel that there was something more there, to reach for. A higher level.

She needed to reach it.

Chifuyu was already confident in her ability to defeat any other IS pilot in the world in single combat, but her mother had an entire organization at her beck and call. So Chifuyu had to get strong enough to defeat everyone, all at once. That was what she had always been reaching for. To be able to win even if everyone else in the whole world turned against her and Ichika.

And she wasn't there yet. She knew she wasn't. Hell, she may not even be at the level yet to be able to defeat her mother if that woman ever managed to get her claws on one of Tabane's creations.

Her mother was a monster.

Chifuyu still wondered every now and then about how things could have been different back when she had escaped with Ichika all those years ago, had her mother been there at the time to try and stop her.

The woman had been in a different country, and she had let her guard down due to the facade of obedience that Chifuyu had put up for her for years. It had just been her lackeys that Chifuyu had had to deal with instead. And that had allowed them to get out.

She had changed her and her brother's names since then, since he had been too young at the time to notice, gotten new identities for them both, and had whisked her brother away to a new home. But she had no doubt at all that that woman was scouring the Earth in an attempt to find them again. And she knew that her mother would eventually succeed in doing so one day.

So she had to be ready. Even if that meant never being around the one person that she loved more than anything else in the entire world.

If she allowed herself to stay with Ichika for any extended length of time as she currently was, she knew that she would never be able to leave him again. He was simply too... irresistible, and she wouldn't have the willpower. And while that would probably make her the happiest woman in the world, it wouldn't last when her mother got involved. And then she'd be too weak to defend that life.

So she had to keep going. She had to spend every waking second of her life, either training, or resting from the injuries she sustained from said training. Then maybe at the end of it all, once she had the strength she needed, she could finally stand by his side. To earn that life that she craved more than anything else, and to be able to keep it, forever.

In the end, that was all that she really wanted.

* * *

Unfortunately, however, this all came with the unintended side effect of never being there to see her brother grow up. Or to see him create a multi-billion dollar corporate empire. A phrase she had never imagined would ever apply to Ichika.

Life just kept throwing her weird curveballs.

But as much of her brother's life as she had missed out on, she hadn't missed all of it. Just a significant portion. Which meant that upon reflection, Chifuyu could actually point out two instances where something about her brother had radically changed.

She had no idea what the underlying reason for either of those changes had been, and she could only pick up on these changes now that she had had her eyes opened as to what her brother had been up to recently, but she could still tell that he had changed quite significantly in those two moments.

The first time had been back when he was six years old. He had been a very happy, bubbly, and noisy child one day, and then a still-happy and cheerful, but much quieter child the next.

All of a sudden, it had been as if all of the thoughts he used to express aloud had just been muted suddenly. As if all of the childish immaturity had simply been stripped from him.

Chifuyu had put it down to him simply maturing, and had frankly appreciated the change, but in retrospect, she probably should have picked up on the fact that it had practically happened overnight. Especially since she didn't know the cause of the change, even today.

And then there was the second change, the one that she really regretted not addressing when it had happened.

Back when Ichika had been in grade 6, one day, he had come home with a… _disturbing _look in his eye. Chifuyu had never really been able to put her finger on what it was. Fanatical determination probably fit best. As if he had discovered life's ultimate meaning.

Chifuyu hadn't asked him about it at the time, though, unfortunately. Just like always, she had been about to leave him alone again. She had walked out the door without ever asking about what had happened. And when she had come home a week or so later, nothing had seemed out of place.

She hadn't asked him about it. So here she was, relegated to researching her own brother on the internet, because his Wikipedia page had more info on him than she did.

He had made his fortune in robotics, according to his biography. He had created what was essentially, a general purpose labourer that could do almost any physical task that a human could. Somehow. She had absolutely no idea where he had gotten the knowledge or the skillset to do something like that, but he had figured it out somehow.

As a result, he was currently at the center of a huge controversy because that technology could automate hundreds of millions of jobs away.

His robots weren't as versatile as human beings were. Not by a long shot. They weren't able to hold conversations at all, or even speak for that matter. But her brother had managed to invent a system that allowed humans to teach these machines how to perform tasks quickly.

A human would demonstrate a task to the robot, and then the robot would copy it. And then there were a bunch of machine learning tricks that would be used to refine and optimize the task even further until it ended up well beyond the ability of the humans that had taught it in the first place.

So they weren't perfect by any means. But any one of his robots could learn how to do any physical task that a human could, and they could do it better. Without ever getting tired, or needing a break. All at the cost of pennies of electricity.

There was a huge demand for this. So Ichika had made a lot of money from the mass production and sale of these robot labourers since he was the only one in the world who had the capability to make them. There were no other competing companies in this field in the entire world. So he was even making agreements with foreign governments, and private companies overseas.

This alone would have been enough to set him up for life.

But he hadn't stopped. With these funds, he had started making rockets, and earned one hell of a reputation doing so. He had picked up some satellite launch contracts from the government, and from some other private companies, and had used that money to further develop his rocket designs.

Then he had started an asteroid mining company and had launched his own prospecting mission, wanting to get an estimate on how much one particular, giant rock was worth.

She continued going through various links, in escalating disbelief.

There was a ton of information about him on the internet that she had never known about. Before all of this, he used to be a professional gamer. People actually paid him money, to sit in front of a TV and play video games. She didn't even know that that was a thing. But apparently, he used to be damn good at it, too.

Her brother practically had the equivalent of her own reputation in this industry. He was considered the best, and had hundreds of world records, particularly in the speedrunning community. Apparently, he was really good at playing video games, really fast.

'_What the hell had happened that day?'_

He had been doing relatively normal things before that moment, but now he might as well be an alien.

Playing video games professionally was... _somewhat _normal, she supposed. Weird and unexpected, but normal. Building robots and launching rockets on the other hand, wasn't. All of his business adventures had started happening almost immediately after that moment when his demeanor had changed.

Why couldn't she have just asked?

Chifuyu let out a sigh.

Fuck.

She had missed so much about his life.

He had been travelling around the world for years without her knowledge. Negotiating business deals, participating in video game events and tournaments, giving interviews, and he had even given a bunch of public lectures on all sorts of topics.

There was so much information about him on the internet that there was no way she would be able to go through it all in one sitting.

He had millions of followers on social media, and was a very well known and controversial public figure.

He had also become the national champion for Kendo when he was 8. Which seriously made her wonder why her brother had never told her about it. She hadn't even known that he had intended to compete, let alone that he was good enough to win.

Was this how her brother felt about her and IS suits in general? Where she was just part of her own separate world that defied understanding, while he was just a spectator that could do nothing but observe from the outside?

That was certainly how she felt about him, now.

When she had more time, she'd have to take a look at some of the other stuff he'd been up to. She needed to get to know him again.

Next time she had one of her training sessions, or maybe during another lunch break of hers, she'd have to throw on one of his videos or interviews in the background. She could probably even get her IS to stream it straight from the internet.

* * *

Chifuyu wanted to slam her face into the closest wall. Because her brother just couldn't make things simple, could he? He was on the news again, having just rocked the world with another revelation.

The first male capable of piloting an IS.

She had absolutely no idea how the hell he had managed that one, but at least she was in a position to do something about it this time. The IS was her domain after all.

She took in a deep breath... and sighed, before finally planning out what she needed to do.

If her mother hadn't seen Ichika on the news during any of his stunts before now, then she certainly had now. His face was everywhere. This would definitely have caught that woman's attention, and she'd recognize her son immediately. She would make her move soon.

So Chifuyu would have to start making preparations now. Both to protect her brother from their mother, and to protect him from the rest of the governments who now very clearly, all wanted a piece of him.

It was going to be a long day. She'd need a drink or two before it was done.

* * *

**AN: I have no beta reader for this story by the way. So there may be errors.**


	2. Chapter 2: The Nuclear Option

**Disclaimer: I don't own Infinite Stratos in any sense.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

Ichika punched through the wall of the room with all of his strength. The whole thing blew outwards, shooting building materials in all directions, and creating a gaping hole there.

His eyes were glowing a burning shade of scarlet red, and a furious snarl was spread across his face.

He was livid.

If he had been in public, he'd have murdered everyone in his sight, innocent or not. No question at all. He was so pissed off in that moment that he would have killed anyone who so much as looked at him the wrong way. Which was sort of the reason why he was in a secret bunker that he had built, instead of out on the streets somewhere. When he lost control of himself like this, the only thing he could do to stop himself from doing something he'd regret was to lock himself away somewhere where no one could find him.

He had utterly smashed everything in the room. Again. This had not been the first time he had lost control over himself like this, but it was certainly the first time he had ever gone this far. He wanted blood. People needed to die, and he wanted to kill them himself.

The government had tried to fuck with him. After he had spent years working with their military and launching their satellites, and letting them use his robots, they had turned on him in an instant, and had expected him to just fucking, _roll over._

As soon as he had been outed as an IS pilot, they had wanted access to his genetic data.

The thing was, the only process that they could use to get it from him would kill him. A simple DNA test would not suffice for this. So the government had basically ordered him to give himself up voluntarily so that they could euthanize him like an animal to see what his genes looked like.

'_For the greater good,'_ they had said.

And then they had said that he didn't really have a choice in the matter. If he refused, the entire Japanese military would simply be mobilized if it came to that, and he would be taken in by force and killed, consequences be damned.

Ichika stalked down the hallway that he had just revealed with his last punch.

There had been a door just a few feet to his left, but he had been way too angry to use it like a normal person.

'_This is it,' _Ichika thought to himself as he sat down at the computer terminal at the end of the hall.

This was his killing floor. The point of no return.

He logged in, and accessed his private server.

'_The government wants to play hardball with me? Well alrighty then! Let's play some hardball!'_

What was the population of Japan? 150 million?

He'd fucking _halve _it before this night was through.

He'd economically collapse the entire country, kill tens of millions of its people, and irreparably destroy it.

He'd wipe it off this Earth!

'_Let's see what the government has to say about that,' _he thought to himself. '_You want to pick a fight with me?! I'll destroy your entire country!'_

Ichika opened up a program labeled 'Plan B,' on his desktop and typed in the password.

A map of the world appeared before him.

This was the furthest he had ever gone.

On two separate occasions in the past, he had been angry enough to make it to this room. The point where he was just a few mouse clicks away from becoming the world's first biological super terrorist. But he had never actually sat down and logged in before. He'd always calmed down and turned back well before doing so.

But not this time.

He was the first human being in history to wield this level of power. The power to terminate all life on Earth if he so wished. Not even nuclear weapons could manage this feat. They were pretty devastating all things considered, but even in the event of a worldwide nuclear holocaust, there would inevitably be some people somewhere, who would slip through the cracks and survive.

Somebody, somewhere, would live through an event like that. Whether they were on a submarine at the time, or on board a space station, or they were a caveman, someone would make it through.

But Ichika's Plan B had the potential to truly get them all if he wished it so.

He could poison the atmosphere itself.

A caveman would have to eventually come outside to breathe. And an astronaut, or a submarine crew member would one day have to land back on land. And when that happened, they would die then.

Every last human being. He could take them all out.

Ichika had never wanted this power. It certainly hadn't been why he had invested so much of his time, effort, and money into researching nanomachines, originally. Ichika's nanomachines were without question the most highly advanced in the world. No one else's even came close.

They were the engine that powered all of his technological pursuits. He could 3d print anything now with atomic scale resolution with them, giving him the potential to create anything he could ever imagine so long as he had the raw materials, designs, and the energy requirements.

If he licensed out these machines for the rest of the world to use, he would utterly change the world.

Instead, however, he kept them a secret. He kept them to himself. Hidden in all of his factories behind the scenes, where they were used to build his robots, his computers, and his rockets. Lesser technologies that the world wouldn't freak out too much about.

He didn't let anyone else ever even see his real technology in action, because getting rich had never been his end goal. So he would not benefit from sharing his real technology with others. Instead, he had another plan. And his nanomachines were crucial to its success.

But as fantastically capable as they were, they came with a downside. Technology was a double edged sword. Fire could keep a person warm on a cold winter night, and it could cook a person's food. But it could also be used to burn down buildings and kill people.

The same was true with his nanomachines. They could be used to create almost anything. Including a self-replicating, highly contagious, artificial pathogen that had been specifically engineered to have the capability of exterminating the entire human race.

This was what he referred to as Plan B.

He had already created and mass-produced this pathogen, and he had a massive population of the cells just waiting for him to press 'Go.' They were stored on the backs of his own specially designed air burst ballistic missiles that he had deployed in secret locations on every single populated land mass in the world.

Ichika had a grand strategy in place. He had had one ever since the day his life had changed back when he was in middle school. And since most people in the world would probably not be ready for what he intended to do in this vision, Ichika had created a backup plan.

If someone tried to fuck with him and derail his vision, they would die. It was as simple as that.

And with the added possibility of a gender war on the horizon interfering with things, with women piloting those damn suits and destabilizing the balance of power, he had needed a way to tip the scales again.

This had led him to the creation of Plan B. His Nuclear Option.

If the whole world united against him, he would win the ensuing battle. That was the point. Even if that meant he'd purge the rest of the world of all life. Humanity would die before he'd let his vision fail.

He had been in a very dark place both mentally, and emotionally, when he had conceived of this backup plan. And even more so when he had actually gone through with the steps to set it all up for real. But he had never really expected to use it. Simply knowing that he had this option was usually enough of a deterrent whenever he ended up in one of these psychotic frenzies of his.

Just knowing that if things spiraled out of his control and truly started to go wrong he would still have a way out, was usually enough to liberate him from that state of mind.

But even as furious as he was at the moment, now that Ichika was in front of his computer, the reality of the situation became very real, very quickly.

He could actually do this. There was no exaggeration or hyperbole here. He could hit a few keystrokes and kill hundreds of millions of people. The world wouldn't even know what hit it. It wouldn't even take three hours for his nanomachines to do the job, either. He had already strategically positioned them to maximize the death toll.

However, they were too imprecise for his liking. He could not target specific individuals with them and leave others unscathed. He had not yet developed this capability. If he pressed 'go,' _everyone _would be affected except for the select few individuals that he had secretly given the cure to in advance, without their knowledge. Like his sister, and a few of his friends.

He could also limit the geographical area if he wanted to. He didn't have to launch all of his missiles at once. If he launched his pathogen in Japan only, he could shut the nanomachine swarm down before it started spreading overseas to other locations. Which was what his current plan was.

Japan had fucked with him, so he would fuck with them right back _harder_.

But it was a truly humbling experience, knowing that he had this ability and was moments away from potentially unleashing it. There would be no going back if he crossed this line. And with this thought in mind, Ichika took a deep breath and sighed.

Someone like him definitely shouldn't have this power.

Ichika had a demon in him. He had discovered that when he was six. There was this side of him that was an absolute monster. A genuinely insane, cruel, psychotic monster. And it came out whenever he was truly angry.

He had spent all of his life trying to hide it as best as he could, but his grip on it wasn't ironclad. It slipped through the cracks every now and then. But he had known about this well before this moment. He had carefully tried to manage this side of himself in the same way one would manage the side effects of a disease they had.

By carefully managing the symptoms as appropriate, and trying not to let it control his life. So he was used to preparing countermeasures against himself in advance for these moments of weakness where the monster slipped out of his grasp.

He had put in a few failsafes into this kill-system of his so that he couldn't just activate it instantly on a whim. In front of him, one of them had just appeared. It was a simple text prompt telling him to call his sister. It was a simple thing that he had programmed in as one of his many last ditch attempts to ground him back on Earth if he ever made it to this moment.

Just a simple textbox pop-up with a picture of his sister Chifuyu, and a phone number.

Ichika hated other human beings. But there were a few of them that he didn't. And one above all that he treasured above everything.

_That _human.

His sister.

This simple text prompt was just supposed to serve as a last reminder to really get him to consider what he was doing. And just as planned, this pop-up cut through the red haze that his mind had been reduced to, and brought him back from the edge.

He reeled the monster back in most of the way, and the aura of sheer malice surrounding him significantly reduced in intensity.

Taking a few more moments to collect himself, Ichika opened up his cell phone, and dialed the number. He was pretty sure that he had already calmed down enough to not become a mass murderer today, but he really wanted to hear his sister's voice again anyway.

* * *

Ichika had lived a pretty sheltered life, all things considered. Everything he had ever wanted or needed, his sister had provided for him. Despite the useless burden to her that he had to have been until only recently, she still seemed to genuinely care about him, and he had never figured out why.

She had sacrificed so much over the years for his sake. He had constantly held her back at every turn. And once he had been old enough to realize this, all he had ever wanted from then on was to find a way to pay her back. Because he owed her so much.

His biggest dream had been to one day show to his sister that it had all been worth it. That everything she had done to get him that far had paid off in the end. But for such a long time, he had no idea what he could do.

What could he have ever done for her? Chifuyu hardly needed any sort of protection. She was basically the strongest person in the world. She was unbeatable, clearly. Nobody would ever be able to hurt her, she was invincible. It would be an insult to her to suggest that he could protect her from anything. He'd never be in a position to do that.

Getting rich certainly helped, he supposed. She no longer needed to pay for his expenses, and he had even been able to completely refund every last penny that his sister had ever spent on raising him, plus interest. Ensuring that she had actually profited significantly from doing so.

But this wasn't enough for Ichika. It was the time loss that he had caused her that truly bothered him. How many times had he unintentionally forced her to set her own dreams aside for a month or two so that she could come back to the house to look after him? That was time that she would never get back.

And it had been wasted on him. It was as if he had simply been born into the world for the sole purpose of holding his sister back from true greatness. To be some sort of needless weight on her, dragging her back down to the ground whenever she tried to do anything.

And he hated it. He hated it so much.

But one day, everything had changed.

* * *

Ichika had had a rather violent middle school experience. It had been at a time when he was still trying to come to terms with just how much of a monster _that _side of him could be when it slipped out. He had been piss poor at controlling it, and he had wanted to fight people all the time.

But he had eventually figured out that that side of him was surprisingly reasonable, psychotic as it was. It was almost as if he could make deals with it. As long as he provided an outlet for that rage, it would be content and wouldn't cause trouble. And it didn't really matter what the outlet was.

So Ichika had started coming up with constructive ways to direct that anger. Controlling it and suppressing it had failed, so he had decided to redirect it.

He had picked up gaming as a hobby. Mostly because it allowed him to kill thousands and thousands of people without actually hurting anyone because they were virtual NPCs, not real people.

And that had worked for a while to sate this demon in him. It had simply been a side effect that in his quest to optimize the amount of virtual people and creatures he killed, he turned into one of the best gamers in history.

But eventually, the novelty of it had faded, and it was no longer enough for the demon. So he had needed something more real. And he had eventually come up with a pretty interesting scheme.

He had met this girl named Rin back in middle school, who had been an absolute bully _magnet _in school. Nobody he had ever met in his life had been bullied as badly as she had been. She hadn't been able to do anything without a group of bullies falling out of the sky and tormenting her about it.

So naturally, Ichika had chosen to '_befriend'_ her.

Of course, it hadn't been because he actually liked her at all. Not at first, anyway. It had mostly been because it had provided him with a legitimate excuse to get into fights.

The math had been pretty simple.

Rin attracted bullies who picked on her. The bullies pushed her around. Nobody ultimately cared if a bully got their asses handed to them. So Ichika would wait for these moments and be the guy to provide this service.

Everybody would win, in theory. Rin would stop getting bullied, and Ichika would be able to cut loose a little. A bunch of bullies would also be shown their proper place in the world. Underneath Ichika's boot.

But this plan of his had been far more successful than he had ever anticipated. It had started out small. The first time Rin had been bullied in his presence, she and Ichika had been in grade 6, and the bullies had been in grade 8.

So Ichika had let her get pushed around a little, even though he could have easily stopped it before it happened, and then had acted outraged when he '_happened upon the scene.' _This had given him the excuse he needed to walk right into the grade 8 section of the lunch room after this bullying incident, right up to the bully's table, to '_settle the score.' _

And that had really been the start of it all. He had severely underestimated how well connected those bullies had been.

From that point forward, he had gotten into fights all the time with bullies from all over the city. Some of them would take hours out of their day to commute across town, just to try and fight with him and get revenge for their fallen brethren.

And naturally, the demon inside him had loved every single second of it. He'd kick the asses of 20 or 30 bullies all on his own, and then find himself up against the cousins and siblings of those bullies the very next day. And then the cousins and siblings of _those _bullies the day after. And it just kept on escalating in this fashion. Forcing him to take on larger and larger groups of thugs. It just went further and further until eventually, Ichika had found himself up against a Yakuza gang.

Ichika had still simply refused to ever back down.

The demon in him had a simple rule when it came to physical confrontations. Always escalate every conflict. Someone insults you, insult them back worse. Someone pushes you, throw the first punch. Someone messes with a friend of yours, and all bets are off.

This mindset, along with the ridiculously well connected group of bullies he had originally targeted, had created a perfect storm that saw Ichika spending almost his entire middle school life in massive brawls against dozens of opponents, and one day even facing down a Yakuza gang leader.

Like everyone else who had ever picked a fight with him, Ichika had kicked that guy's ass too without much trouble. It hadn't mattered that the man had been an adult, or that he had been a decent swordsman, or even a gang leader. Ichika had simply been better.

But that Yakuza gang leader had been the guy that had shown Ichika his purpose.

Wanting to get in one last shot in at the kid who had kicked his ass, that man had simply said that it didn't matter what either Ichika or his sister did in their lives. One day, maybe in 50 years, or maybe in 90, his sister Chifuyu would either be dead or senile in some old folks home.

That had been the moment where it had all changed. The very moment where the purpose of his life had been revealed to him.

Because the gang leader had been right.

His sister was not invincible after all. There was one, very specific weakness that no matter what she did, she could not guard against.

She was dying. She had slow onset cancer, slow onset heart disease, slow onset Alzheimers, and many other conditions. Sure they may have been _very _slow onset, as in, she would not get them for another 40 or 50 years, or perhaps even longer, but she would one day get them.

The only reason why she may never get cancer, or any of those other conditions would be because of the fact that something else would have killed her first. Everyone alive was on the path to getting those conditions simply because they were side effects of being alive.

But this was simply unacceptable.

So Ichika had decided to do what he had always done when faced with a problem that pissed him off. Throw every last thing he had at it. He would protect his sister from the one thing that she would never be able to protect herself from. Time itself. And he would not fail.

This realization had upended his entire view of the world.

It was like a conveyor belt. A simple conveyor belt that had on it, every single human being currently alive.

At the beginning of the belt was where all the newborns were. They would be put on at one end, representing the moment they were born into the world, and would slowly start making their way to the other end as the belt moved. As time went on. At the end of the belt, however, there was a furnace that burned alive everyone who fell into it.

Every single human being who had ever been alive had once been on this belt, and had met their fates in an inferno. And every human being who would ever one day be alive, would eventually find themselves there as well.

It wasn't a perfect analogy by any means. People could die before ever reaching the end of the belt for example, so it would probably be more accurate to say that this conveyor belt was running through the middle of a shooting range, but it illustrated the concept.

What this random Yakuza gang leader had done for him had been to present a choice that for some reason, nobody else seemed to ever think about.

As a human being on this conveyer belt, you could either recognize your situation and say something to the effect of: '_Oh well. What can you do? It's just how things are meant to be. It's natural for everyone to fall off the end of the belt one day into that furnace to be cooked alive,' _like everyone else seemed to, or you could take the other option.

'_No, fuck you.'_

Ichika liked this option a lot more. It seemed way more reasonable. So he had now dedicated his life to fixing this problem at all costs. Because Chifuyu Orimura, his sister, was on this belt too. And that meant that no matter how powerful she was, she would one day fall off the end of it unless he did something. So Ichika had decided to make a stand.

_That _wasn't going to happen without one hell of a fight first.

He would find a way to halt the entire conveyor belt if he had to. Finding an ultimate cure for aging had simply been resolved into a choice between right and wrong. If he didn't do it, his sister would die.

He would sacrifice everything to succeed if that was what it took. His humanity, the lives of all 8 billion or so other humans, and even his own life if it came to that. Because Chifuyu was more important than any of that.

_That _was how he would repay her.

Every step he had taken from that point forward, developing his computers, nanotechnology, robots, and rockets, had all been planned out in order to facilitate that ultimate goal.

* * *

The IS Academy. That was Chifuyu's plan.

It was certainly a step up from his own plan, that was for sure. It would buy him three years.

Thanks to a couple of legal loopholes, his sister had managed to shoehorn him in there as a student. And while he was there, he would be immune from the reach of all world governments, including Japan's.

This would mean that he could delay the government's mission to capture him until after he graduated.

But this wouldn't happen for another 3 years. More than enough time for him to come up with a better solution in dealing with them than Plan B.

It would certainly be annoying having to go to an academy like that, but the idea had merit.

It would slow down his research and waste a lot of his time since he'd be forced to go to classes and learn about a stupid machine he couldn't care less about, but it could work.

Ichika sat back with a sigh and considered his options again.

Yeah. He would do it.

The pros outweighed the cons. And he may even be able to weasel out of a few classes due to how busy his schedule was.

Ichika was legally forced to be in certain locations at certain times due to the nature of his businesses, so he'd have to negotiate something with the headmaster of the IS Academy to allow him to take certain days off.

But he had a team of crackpot lawyers a phone call away to handle most of that. They had been unable to help get the government off his back, but maybe they would be able to help him out here at least.

* * *

**AN: I have no beta reader for this story by the way. So there may be errors.**


	3. Chapter 3: The IS Academy

**Disclaimer: I don't own Infinite Stratos in any sense.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

Ichika's general strategy for curing aging was relatively straightforward.

He didn't need perfect knowledge of how the human body operated.

There were tons and tons of metabolic pathways, and all sorts of other crazy processes going on in order to keep the human body running, and it would be a monumental task, trying to decipher every last one of them. Eventually, he did want all of that figured out, but it wasn't strictly necessary yet in order to get a cure.

None of those fancy molecular shenanigans mattered because the process of aging was nothing more than the lifetime accumulation of damage. So it didn't matter how that damage itself was actually caused. He didn't have to figure out how to slow it down, and he didn't even need to stop it from accumulating.

Instead, he could allow the damage to occur as normal, and simply repair it afterwards. Then repeat that procedure as needed. This sidestepped all of his ignorance on what processes caused this damage, and instead allowed him to focus strictly on how to fix it as it built up.

So his role was similar to a car mechanic. A mechanic did not need to know every last detail about how the vehicle they were working on was constructed. They just needed to know a couple of details on all the major systems, and how to fix them. They did not need to know what specific ores needed to be mined to create the metal alloys in the chassis, or how to manufacture the rubber tires, or any of that other nonsense.

Just the procedures on how to do the maintenance. And this was what Ichika could do with the human body as well.

All he needed to do was classify all types of damage that accumulated in the body during the aging process, and find a way to remove that damage in each of those cases.

And he had also been given a pretty significant advantage in this area before he had even started, as Ichika had access to all published medical, and biological research from around the world to help him out.

Nobody had yet tried to tackle aging head on just yet, so nobody had a list of these types of damage ready to go, but by reading between the lines of these research papers, he could get very good guesses at what some of those categories of damage might be.

All that remained was to create a valid intervention for each of these types of damage with his nanomachines, and then do some tests on rats. If he could make one of those live forever, then he could probably start working with humans soon after.

But something else had to come first before he could truly get started.

His original plan to work with the rest of humanity had to be discarded.

He had originally planned to create a biotech company that would have allowed him to go through all of the legal loopholes and bureaucracy required to allow him to conduct human clinical trials for his cure when he finally had it. To test it out on other humans to get the kinks worked out before administering it to his sister.

However, this required that the government he lived under wasn't acting like a bunch of pricks, so he would have to proceed on his own in total secrecy instead. Humanity was his enemy now, and so he had to start treating them as such.

He'd have to resurrect an old plan of his.

Back in his less ambitious days, he had come up with a plan to acquire an island and build a secret research facility underground on it. Islands were hard to get to, so they were defensible if he ever needed to dig in with a robot army of some sort. And doing all of his work underground would prevent it from being seen by spy satellites.

He had all the technology requirements needed to pull this off as well. It was actually easier to do this than to mine asteroids. The only real advantage of asteroid mining in the first place was the versatility it allowed him in his plans. That had been the reason why he had eventually decided to go that route.

Creating rockets and telling the media that he was going to start asteroid mining with them had given him the perfect cover to develop the ballistic missiles he had needed for his nuclear option.

Additionally, all of the infrastructure that would have to be in place during a large scale asteroid mining operation like that could easily be converted into a military blockade of the entire planet, or some sort of space-faring armada. So he could spend years developing an army in space right under the public scrutiny without raising any red flags.

And he was actually well underway into doing this. That prospecting mission he had just launched, had actually been a Von Neumann Probe. An entity with all the instructions and abilities necessary to land on that asteroid and begin replicating itself. On its own, it could convert the entire mass of that asteroid into whatever Ichika desired. It'd just take a few years to pull off.

That same tech could be easily dropped onto an island somewhere on Earth to do the same thing much faster.

His new goal was to build a base on Earth that he could defend with his technology if a war broke out. He had to finish it in 3 years, and it had to be strong enough to allow him to hold out until his space army was completed. At that point he could retreat into space if it came to that.

If he failed in this mission, and if the rest of the world indeed united against him, he would have no choice but to resort to Plan B.

So he'd have to begin construction as soon as he could. That was where he intended to do his anti-aging research. He couldn't risk letting the public find out, so as soon as this base of his was operational, he would begin ramping up his tests.

He was going to have to―

"Ichika Orimura?" A timid voice broke Ichika out of his thoughts.

Ichika blinked.

Glancing up at the speaker, he found a green haired woman leaning over his desk and smiling nervously at him.

Ms. Yamada Maya, Ichika was pretty sure. He hadn't really been paying much attention for the past few minutes, but he vaguely remembered her introducing herself.

"Yo," he replied, in an uncaring, bored tone.

"C-can you please introduce yourself to the class?" His teacher asked. "Pretty please?"

Ichika could feel the stares of everyone else in the class immediately zero in on the back of his head.

He was in the front row center seat after all. Which meant that all of his classmates were either beside him, or behind him. In perfect positions to shamelessly stare at him.

It was annoying. And it made him think that maybe he should have murdered them all with his nanomachines after all.

But he understood that whatever he said in the next few moments would permanently colour all of his classmates' impressions of him.

"Hm? Didn't you just do that?" He replied lazily.

She had just announced his name to everyone after all. What more did she want from him?

A hesitant and confused look crossed his teacher's face.

"N-no, I meant can you please stand up and tell us all about yourself?"

"Ah, I see."

And Ichika did see.

She wanted him to get up and ramble about his life for a few moments.

"I gotcha, I gotcha. Right-o. Sure thing, teach," he complied, rising to his feet.

He knew exactly what was expected of him now.

Standing up, he turned around to face the rest of the class.

Their eyes were practically shining. They all were clearly very interested in what he was about to say.

_'Better not disappoint…'_

* * *

Chifuyu Orimura slowly walked down the hallway towards her classroom. She had just gotten out of another meeting, and now had to go meet her class.

She had no idea what to expect from them.

Well… she had some idea.

She usually ended up with all of the crazy ones.

Chifuyu was fairly certain that there was a school-wide conspiracy against her. Among all the teachers, and the board members. Everyone else among the staff had probably made a secret agreement behind her back to send all of the... '_special_' students to her class because she was the only one there who was capable enough to straighten them out.

She had no proof, but she was almost certain that this was the case. She had met some of the other teacher's classes in previous years, and none of them had even held a candle to hers in that department.

It was annoying.

And this year in particular would probably be even more annoying than usual due to the fact that she also had her brother in her class.

Normally, she would be pretty happy about that. Ecstatic even. She wouldn't show it at all on the outside, of course, but she would gladly take any opportunity for them to spend time together, even if it was only as teacher and student. Just because she had missed out on so much of those opportunities because of the threat her mother posed.

But in this case, things were a little different. She could already predict that this year was going to be a handful.

The craziest students, plus the world's only male IS pilot, all in the same class, was a recipe for disaster. Even she could see this.

So as she walked up to her classroom door and reached to open it and enter the room, she made the prediction that the year would either be more annoying than usual... or it would be mildly entertaining. Probably even a bit of both.

She could already tell that her little brother was going to get into all sorts of trouble on a daily basis. Both the funny kind, and the annoying kind.

And she would have to be there to deal with the mess in both cases.

Just before she opened the door however, she paused as she heard her assistant Maya Yamada speak from inside the class.

She heard her assistant introduce her brother, and Ichika stand up to prepare to introduce himself.

Curiosity got the better of her as to what he would say, so she lowered her hand and instead decided to listen in for a few moments before opening the door.

She hadn't exactly told Ichika that she was his teacher, or that she even worked at the IS Academy at all. So this was an opportunity for her to see a little of what her brother was like when she wasn't around.

Which was perfect considering how little she actually knew about him.

So she'd listen to his introduction, and then enter the class.

* * *

"Hey everyone," Ichika began. "I live on planet Earth."

"For those of you who don't know where that is, I'll admit that it can be a bit hard to find sometimes. Especially at night. But it's a pretty great place, I gotta say. Ten out of ten. Would recommend."

All of the shining eyes that had been staring at him moments ago had now been replaced by disbelieving, and confused stares.

"As for my hobbies," Ichika continued, "...I have a few hobbies."

The class looked hopeful once again.

"I like to spend my time breathing air, and using my eyes to see things in front of me."

...Those hopes were dashed.

"Though I do have a few other hobbies as well."

A few dared to raise their hopes once again.

"...Listening to sounds, for example."

...And were promptly disappointed.

Ichika ignored the disbelieving stares and pressed on.

"Thinking, too. That is a great hobby. Who doesn't like thinking?"

"And wouldn't you know it, just like many other people... I too have a name," Ichika claimed. "If you say it out loud, and I hear it, I might actually respond to it."

"It's actually a pretty crazy concept. Like telepathy. Verbalize my name aloud and I can tell that you're referring to me even from a distance."

"But since I don't want to give up my whole life story here and now, as I'm sure I've already bored most of you with the extensive, and numerous details about my life I've just shared, I think I'll have to leave you all with just that and pass it off to whoever's next in line."

He turned back around to face his substitute homeroom teacher Ms. Yamada.

"How was that?" he asked.

He could hear the entire rest of the class collectively face-fault behind him.

Personally, Ichika thought he had done a pretty solid job.

* * *

Chifuyu was almost impressed, as she opened the door.

Absolutely no information had been shared. Not even his name. He had spoken for about thirty seconds, and had managed to still not relay literally any information about himself.

He had utterly wasted everybody's time, and had managed to irritate her all at once.

She hadn't even entered the classroom yet, and her brother was already bothering her.

She quietly stepped inside the room.

Immediately, Chifuyu noticed that all of the attention was still focused on her brother, and nobody noticed her yet.

"Umm…" she heard Maya hum in confusion. Trying desperately to figure out how to respond to the ridiculous introduction given by her brother.

Chifuyu frowned.

She had a bit of a soft spot for Ms. Yamada. The shy teacher had helped her out a lot in the past in dealing with students who were a little too… emotional for Chifuyu to deal with properly.

Even when all the other teachers conspired against her to send all the crazy students her way, Maya would always be there at her side so that they could face them down together.

So it bothered her a bit that her brother was giving the girl a hard time.

She'd step in and help her assistant out, and give her brother a good whack over the head as retribution.

So she quietly approached her brother, clipboard in hand, from a direction that prevented anyone else in the room from noticing her.

But just as she was about to bring her clipboard down over her brother's head, she altered her plan of action on a whim.

She saw Ichika's stance, and how… impressive it actually was. To an untrained eye it looked totally relaxed. And to Ichika himself, it probably felt that way too since he was clearly so used to it.

But Chifuyu could easily spot how properly balanced it was. And how expertly hidden it's nature was. It wasn't just a brilliant stance, it had been specifically constructed to look like it wasn't. It was highly deceptive, and it was only due to the fact that she had a very similar stance herself that she even recognized it.

Ichika was clearly always ready for an attack at any time, but simultaneously, he made it look like he wasn't. He was inviting attacks from those who weren't skilled enough to notice this detail. Which meant that he had trained quite extensively without her knowledge.

Especially since he could take that stance without even thinking about it.

All of these observations flashed through her head in about a tenth of a second.

So she changed her plan slightly. She remembered some of the information she had researched on her brother on the internet and in particular, how talented he apparently was at Kendo, and devised a bit of a test at the last moment.

Exactly how skilled was he?

Chifuyu was very good at estimating other people's skill levels based on almost no information about them. A simple move from them was all it would typically take for her to get a good read.

And since her brother still hadn't noticed her yet, mostly due to the results of her own extensive training in hiding her presence without needing to think about it, this was a perfect opportunity.

She shifted the clipboard to her other hand and swung her fist instead.

Time slowed down to a near standstill as she completely focused on the movement. It was perfectly calculated, and she was prepared at any instant to radically accelerate or decelerate her strike even mid flight. While simultaneously ensuring that it looked like a simple, playful whack over the head to anyone watching, rather than a ridiculously precise and calculated movement that pretty much nobody else in the world had the skill to replicate.

She had fantastic control over her own strength and could easily halve, double, or triple the force of any of her strikes even after she had thrown them. And she would do so depending on the rate at which her brother reacted.

She would push him right to the very edge of his reaction speed, and then would be able to deduce how much strength he was hiding as a result.

If he was slower than expected, she'd slow down. If he was faster, she'd speed up. If he didn't react at all… she'd whack him.

Well… she intended to whack him anyway. But if he didn't move at all, she would have overestimated his abilities.

And she would make this split second decision in the roughly half second window of time that it would take for her fist to close the distance to her brother's head.

* * *

Abruptly, Ichika's desk exploded as he instinctively dodged a high speed swing from an unknown source.

After leaping out of the way, Ichika glanced back towards the source of the strike and caught the irritated gaze of Chifuyu Orimura. His beloved sister.

And she didn't look too happy.

"What do you think you're doing giving that sort of introduction, moron?" His sister asked him.

Ichika was just confused.

Why was his sister here? Where had she even come from? He was pretty sure she hadn't been in the room a few seconds ago.

"D-did you follow me here?" He asked. "I assure you that's unnecessary."

Had she escorted him here to ensure he made it there safely? While he certainly appreciated the gesture, he didn't think she needed to do that. She also hadn't done that for him since he had been in elementary school.

A tick mark appeared on his sister's forehead.

"I work here you idiot."

"Oh."

* * *

Well that was certainly unexpected, Chifuyu thought to herself.

Her brother had broken her test.

He had done something that she had only seen a handful of other people in the world do.

She had expected Ichika to dodge as quickly as he could based on instinct. But he hadn't done so. He had done something instead that had demonstrated a completely different level of skill.

There was a philosophy in combat that only the strongest people in the world were capable of adhering to effectively. And that was the philosophy of _Subconscious Minimal Effort._

The _Minimal Effort_ part, referred to the ability of staying exactly one step ahead of your opponent, and no further. Allowing a person to defeat an opponent as easily and efficiently as possible, while also having the added advantage of deceiving any spectator about their true level of skill.

Chifuyu herself followed this philosophy, as did her psychotic family, and now apparently, so did her brother.

But the best of the best were capable of taking this concept one step further.

The _Subconscious_ part of this philosophy is when a fighter is so skilled at adhering to this idea that it has become ingrained in their instinctual response.

Instead of dodging an unexpected strike outright, they will dodge it with the narrowest margin of error possible so that their opponent will think to themselves: '_Look at that! He just barely dodged my attack in time! I can win this!'_ Or some nonsense along those lines.

And they will be so good at this that the subconscious part of their mind will perform this for them without them having to think about it at all. Or in Ichika's case, without him even noticing that he had done so at all.

In that brief window of time, as her fist had advanced towards her brother's head, Ichika's instincts had kicked in, and he had attempted to dodge. But his instincts had guided him to follow this philosophy. So they had calculated the speed and strength of her attack, anticipated where it would land, and guided Ichika to dodge at a speed that would have allowed him to dodge it by a hair, and no more.

But Chifuyu herself, was a master in this philosophy as well.

Seeing the fact that her strike would miss by a hair, she had sped up her attack mid swing by a tiny amount. Just enough so that her strike would in fact land after all, but only just.

Ichika's subconscious instincts had again flared as a result, seeing this new outcome, and had sped up the speed of the dodge a little more once again.

...And it had immediately devolved into an arms race.

Both had immediately started accelerating their respective maneuvers in an attempt to just barely stay ahead of the other.

At any point, either of them could have simply put the game aside and went all out. But it was in neither of their best interests to do so.

Chifuyu wanted to see what her brother was capable of, and would not see it if she simply struck him down in an instant with her full strength. And Ichika was following Subconscious Minimal Effort, which meant he would not go all out unless he had no other choice. If her attack would land if he didn't do so, in other words.

And Chifuyu had wanted to pinpoint the exact moment where this would happen. Where Ichika could accelerate no further. Where he capped out. And then she would have been able to take a mental note of the level of strength she had used to get that to happen, to get an estimate on the upper bound of Ichika's abilities.

So they had both started rapidly accelerating, and then the game had transcended to an entirely new level.

Ichika's instincts, and her own, had immediately taken things up a notch when they had tried to start anticipating the rate at which they were each accelerating, and even the rate that that acceleration itself was increasing, to try and remain just slightly ahead of the other.

...And then Chifuyu had eventually been met with a decision.

She could either stop her test in order to avoid destroying her brother's desk, by either summoning a good portion of her hidden strength to whack him for real, or by simply stopping her strike, or she could continue her test by accelerating even further and accepting the fact that no matter what happened, her fist would hit that desk at the end of its trajectory and destroy it.

She had fundamentally been limited by space, and her own curiosity.

She didn't have the room to both stop her strike from doing any collateral damage, and continue her test of Ichika's reflexes, so she had to choose between them.

Her curiosity had won out, and so she had pushed the test further.

Ichika had stayed just a hair in front of her fist the whole way down, until it crashed into the desk.

At that moment, as fist met surface, the weaker of the two gave out. The desk was smashed and she hadn't felt a thing.

Since her brother had successfully dodged, all she had managed to figure out was a lower bound on his capabilities. Chifuyu now knew that he was at least on her former student Laura Bodewig's level. When she wasn't using her special ability, anyways.

That was a lower estimate, too. It was very likely that he was significantly stronger than that.

If Chifuyu had decided to spare Ichika's desk, and stop her strike earlier than she had, her estimate for this lower bound of skill would have been much lower, and as a result, far more inaccurate. So a sacrificed desk had been worth the information.

But she had not gotten the full picture. So while she now knew that he was good enough to fight on Bodewig's level― which to be fair, had come as a massive surprise to her, as that girl was way stronger than anyone her age should be― she did not know if that was the best he could do.

She still needed more information.

But she couldn't just… swing at him again to get it. Her last test had only been possible because she could disguise it as being an action prompted from her being irritated at her brother giving his teacher a hard time.

She'd have to figure something else out.

* * *

_'Well that certainly explains a lot of things,'_ Ichika thought to himself.

So his big sister Chifuyu worked here.

Before he could reply to her in detail, however, he was sidetracked after seeing what remained of his desk from the corner of his eye.

"Whoa," Ichika made his amazement known as he finally took notice of the rubble that his desk had been smashed into by his sister's bare hand.

It was in utter shambles.

He knelt down on the ground and started sifting through the debris.

"How much did you practice, big sis?" Ichika asked in amazement.

She had to have spent hundreds of hours just smashing tables to get this good at it.

"Just look at how clean this cut is," Ichika pointed out, showing the piece of wood to her. "How did you even do this?"

From his position on the ground, he looked back up and met his sister's eyes.

"Truly masterful work. Well done. I am in awe."

Ichika observed as his sister's eyes narrowed further in irritation.

That was when the whispers started. All of his classmates started whispering to each other about how they were siblings, and how crazy that was.

Ichika thought it was strange however, that nobody else commented on his newly destroyed desk. That was way cooler in his opinion than the fact that his teacher was related to him.

Hearing the whispers, and wanting to end this conversation, Chifuyu simply sighed in irritation and said: "Sit down already, you're holding everything up."

Then she turned and started walking towards the front of the class.

* * *

As she walked towards the front of the room, Chifuyu put aside all of her thoughts about testing her brother's strength even further to satisfy her curiosity, and instead considered all of the reasons why she was even at the academy as an instructor in the first place.

She had been doing a lot of thinking about that recently.

All things considered, there really wasn't a whole lot keeping her there. It was really just a couple of threads that she just couldn't snip, yet.

If strength were her only goal, she would probably benefit more by asking her billionaire brother to build her a training field with a blank cheque to all of the worlds most state of the art equipment with no strings attached, and with no students to have to waste her time teaching.

Then she could literally retire from public life altogether and spend all of her time doing what she needed to do to prepare for the day their mother showed up.

She'd probably have to sit down and explain everything about their family to Ichika if she did this though, and she was definitely dreading that conversation.

But either way, strength wasn't her only goal so it was a moot point. It was her main goal, but she couldn't afford to only focus on it.

While she was in her position at the academy, she had a very wide field of view into what all of the governments of the world were up to, and she would lose that if she left. She'd also lose all of her connections. She had actually managed to find a few allies that she was pretty sure would come to her aid if things really started to go south. And the only reason she was allowed to remain in contact with them was due to her position.

So even though she had no choice but to admit that all of her reasons for _wanting _to remain there were pretty much gone now, there still remained all the reasons that were _forcing_ her to be there. And those problems wouldn't go away no matter how much money her brother threw at them. She was at the IS Academy for several important reasons, and she couldn't just leave whenever she wanted to.

None of this inner turmoil appeared in her expression at all.

She turned back around to face her class, and immediately noticed the irritated look that Ichika was trying to conceal.

Her little brother was definitely still annoyed at how their situation had turned out.

He had not wanted to come to this place at all, and had basically been forced into this arrangement.

Chifuyu was pretty sure that the public had no idea just how close they had all come to being wiped out in a wide scale war after Ichika's status as an IS pilot came out.

The government had wanted her brother to be ripped apart on a dissection table so they could figure out what the reason was.

To borrow a phrase that her brother used all the time, the Japanese government had _drawn a line in the sand_ and wouldn't budge on that issue, either. That would have happened if they had gotten their way.

But they hadn't. Because Chifuyu had _drawn her own line in the sand._

The government wanted Ichika dead on an operating table so they could figure out what made him tick, and she had _disagreed_ to put it lightly.

She'd personally murder a million innocent people with her bare hands just to keep him safe. That was the bottom line. Children, elders, women, men, politicians, royalty… animals even, she didn't care. It didn't make a difference to her.

Ichika was hers, and that was that. She would personally destroy every threat to that. She didn't give a damn what the government ordered, or even the emperor. She'd murder them all.

But both sides had had this level of conviction. The government didn't just... _back off_ after not getting their way. It doubled down.

Both sides had been ready to use extreme force to get the other to capitulate.

At first, one might think that the Government of Japan would win that battle. It was one person against a national government, after all. Two people if you counted her brother. But one also had to take into account the fact that she had personal ties to Tabane Shinonono. Someone who would not take the government's side in that sort of situation.

The government knew that she and Tabane were friends. There was no way that they could prove that they were still in contact with each other, but she and Tabane had gone to school together, and the government had dug up all of that information a long time ago.

So it was an open secret that Tabane would come to her aid.

The public didn't know this, but the people up top would.

Ichika was pretty close with Tabane too. Or at least he used to be. Chifuyu had no idea if he still was, but they were clearly close enough. Because when Chifuyu had explained this situation to Tabane as it had been unfolding, Tabane had been _furious_. And had reassured her that _yes_, in fact, she would help out her I-kkun if it came down to it.

Both sides had seen the writing on the wall, and both sides hadn't cared. Thousands of people would have died in the ensuing conflict, but the genetic data from her brother was apparently worth that sacrifice to the government.

This was how powerful the IS units had become.

A military without an IS unit could not defeat another military that had one. So the potential of reverse engineering whatever process was happening inside her brother to allow him to pilot one was worth this risk.

There were something like 4 billion people in the world who were men, after all. And if one country could figure out how to get them to pilot these machines, and then hid that information from everyone else, they could become a superpower. Their IS pilot pool would double in size. And whoever had that edge would become incredibly powerful.

So the government wanted this data. And there was no way to extract it without killing her brother, apparently. But she certainly wouldn't ever let that happen.

So the proceeding events had pretty much been inevitable.

The government would try to arrest her brother. She would refuse to let him go. They would try to use force. Then she would kill them all.

Then shit would hit the fan.

Because you can't just murder a bunch of government agents and then just… go back to normal life after. The military would be called in, as well as all of the country's top IS pilots, and everything would immediately escalate.

But at the last moment, just before they had all spiraled into this gigantic clusterfuck of a situation, the rational, _non_-blood thirsty part of her brain had remembered about the IS Academy.

There were a few convenient legal loopholes that had allowed her to get her brother enrolled as a student there, giving him legal protection.

It was the only location in the world where everyone there was immune from the jurisdiction of all governments. Which meant that the Japanese government in particular, couldn't do anything to anyone that was legally allowed to be there without violating an international treaty, losing all international support, and suffering from some pretty severe consequences as a nation.

They might try to kidnap Ichika with a black ops, off the books operation, but she had experience in both participating in, and countering such missions.

So she could effectively delay this conflict for as long as Ichika was a student at the academy. Which meant that she had about 3 years to figure out how to properly deal with the inevitable situation facing them when her brother finally graduated. Because the government would be waiting for him there at the end.

If nothing changed by then, they'd all be back at square one. With everyone drawing lines in the sand again, and getting ready to start a war.

But 3 years was a long time.

Ichika sure hadn't liked being forcibly enrolled. But he had grudgingly admitted that it had probably been the best option they had had after she explained herself.

But if she were being honest, part of her wished that she hadn't done it. Just so she could actually have an excuse to kill everyone that intended to come after her brother _now_, so they wouldn't become a problem later.

And judging by the look in her brother's eye at that moment, it seemed as if it still didn't sit well with him either.

But as much as she wanted to leave, she knew that it probably wouldn't be a good idea.

Ichika needed to be there to stop a war from happening over him, and she needed to be there to make sure he was still there.

But she could not deny that there was a large part of her that really wanted to start that war.

She hadn't exactly informed Ichika of the fact that she would immediately start slaughtering thousands of people to ensure he was never taken away from her, though. Chifuyu had gone to great lengths to hide that part of herself from him. So Ichika probably wasn't even aware of how far she would go.

"And you will refer to me as Orimura-sensei while we are at school, is that clear?" She clarified to her brother with a cold voice.

It was probably best to get that out of the way now.

Chifuyu definitely didn't want to make it seem like she was there for his sake, or to make it look like she was being overprotective, or that she was hovering, or clingy, so she intended to put a good bit of distance between them. Just like always.

Her feelings for her brother ran a whole lot deeper than Ichika probably realized, and frankly, even she was disturbed by them at times. But that was a whole can of worms that she was just going to lock in the back of her mind like always, and never even consider trying to open until her mother was dead.

In any case, the best way to do this was to put as much distance between them as possible. So she would not allow familial, casual names between them like she usually would when they were alone. She was his teacher first while they were in the walls of the academy.

"You're my homeroom teacher?" Ichika asked.

"Yes. You have a problem with that?"

"Not at all, Orimura sensei."

"Good."

* * *

_'This will actually be kind of interesting,'_ Ichika thought to himself.

It would also sort of suck, though. His sister being here.

The whole situation in general sort of sucked. But coming to the academy was certainly better than Plan B, that was for sure.

Mostly due to the fact that he had never told Chifuyu about his nuclear option, and would probably need to explain it to her if he ever intended to go through with it. Just to… you know. Explain why there were now 8 billion dead people. And he was definitely dreading that conversation.

He had gone to great lengths to hide that part of himself from her, so she probably had no idea how far he was willing to go.

But the main reason why it'd suck that his sister in particular was his teacher of all things, was the fact that he would be forced to put up his act unless he wanted her asking him about why he was so much different than he was when it was just the two of them.

When it was just the two of them, Ichika was happy, and showed it.

When he was forced to interact with others, and his sister wasn't around, he wasn't. And he showed it.

He would not hide at all the fact that he hated basically everyone and would scare off anyone who tried to get too close to him.

But Chifuyu had never seen him like that before. So he'd have to put up an act around her and pretend to be friendly to his classmates in order to prevent her from getting suspicious of him.

It pissed him off. The whole situation was just… shitty.

But if he had to remain there and deal with his annoying classmates, he would make one thing sure. The government would not be calling the shots in 3 years time. He would use this time to prepare for that moment.

He'd have to delay his vision to be prepared for the war, but he'd make damn sure that he won it when the time came.

"Alright class!" He heard his sister announce, breaking his train of thought. "I'm your homeroom teacher Ms. Chifuyu Orimura. It's my job to train you well enough to stand on your feet in one year."

The rest of the class immediately started freaking out after hearing that.

"Huh," Ichika grunted in disbelief. "She sure is popular."

He took a long look at his sister as she made an admirable attempt to not let her irritation at being worshipped show, and then he grinned.

Because it was ironic, what his sister was doing. And pretty funny. It seemed as if she was attempting to use the same strategy that he used to use back in middle school. By looking cold all the time, nobody would ever bother him. Though to be fair, part of the reason nobody but Dan, Houki, Rin, and Ran, had ever befriended him probably had more to do with the reputation he had carefully built up for himself than the scowl he used to always wear.

But in any case, his sister's scowl, and powerful presence seemed to horribly backfire on her. Instead of being intimidated, his classmates worshipped her like a goddess.

_'So this is what she's been up to ever since retiring from her career as a pilot then, huh?'_

She had won one final Mondo Grosso and went out in a blaze of glory after having never lost a match. And then became a teacher?

Ichika knew that he would never have the patience to do that.

In fact, it looked like Chifuyu didn't have the patience for it either. It just rubbed him the wrong way that his sister wasn't doing what she seemed to love anymore. And it was even more annoying that he didn't know why.

He was rich now. So she was rich now too by proxy. She had signed a document a few years ago making her a co-owner in most of his companies. None of what he had done would have even been possible without her. And there was a huge lump sum of cash just waiting for her in an account as a result.

She certainly didn't need to work to pay off any bills or debts anymore, or to take care of him. She could go back to being a professional IS pilot at any time.

And Ichika had no idea why she wasn't taking the opportunity.

* * *

**AN: I have no beta reader for this story. So there may be errors.**


	4. Chapter 4: Settling In

**Disclaimer: I don't own Infinite Stratos in any sense.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

It felt like he was at a zoo, inside one of the animal enclosures. Everyone was staring at him openly. Staring, pointing, and whispering behind his back. It was annoying. And by annoying, he meant that he wanted to personally murder them all with his bare hands for doing it.

Closing his eyes, Ichika tried to blot it all out and focus on more important things. Like some of the new changes to his plan that he still needed to make because of the stupid government and their stupid ultimatum.

"Can we talk for a minute?" Someone asked him.

Ichika opened his eyes and looked up at the person addressing him.

It was Houki.

He had noticed her earlier, but due to the way that she had been avoiding eye contact with him, he had figured that she didn't like him very much for some reason. It had been a long time after all. Something like 6 years since they had last spoken to each other. Both of them had changed a lot in that time, and Ichika wasn't sure if they were still friends anymore.

So why was she speaking to him now?

He stared up at her with his typical blank expression for a few moments, before responding.

"Sure. Lead the way."

* * *

Neither of them spoke a word to each other until they were standing on the roof. Since she had been the one to call him up there though, Ichika figured that he should let her be the one to kick things off.

Looking at her, he had no idea what was going through her head. She was refusing to make any eye contact, her face was red, and she looked like she was trying to get whatever she wanted to say out, but couldn't seem to convince herself to.

But it was alright, Ichika supposed. The roof was a quiet place and he didn't have to worry about everyone staring at him up there. He looked up to the sky and closed his eyes. He was a pretty patient guy, and could easily wait for whatever it was that Houki had to say.

* * *

"So that was an… interesting introduction you gave back there," Houki began, hesitantly.

Ichika grinned slightly. He had been very proud of that.

"Yeah it was," he shamelessly agreed.

"I didn't think you were the type of person to do something like that."

"Oh, it was just a little bit of fun. This generation could really use a little more sarcasm in their lives."

"Sarcasm, huh? You've changed a lot since I last saw you."

"Yeah, I guess. People do change, after all."

There was a moment of silence after that. They weren't quite used to each other's presence yet, so the conversation was still awkward and stilted.

"So I heard that you became the Kendo Champion," Ichika said. "Welcome to the club. How's it feel?"

"W-where did you hear about that?!"

"It was in the newspaper."

"And why were you reading that newspaper?"

"Uh… I don't know how to really answer that. Because it's the news, I guess? Lots of people do that."

Houki had a nervous and embarrassed expression on her face after that. She probably hadn't meant to ask a stupid question like that. It had probably just... _come out_ before she could stop it.

"So, it's been a while, huh? What have you been up to for the last 6―" Ichika was interrupted by a ringing sound.

It was his phone.

"Huh?"

Ichika pulled out his phone and looked at the caller ID.

"Tch," He clicked his tongue in irritation before very clearly pressing the ignore button and putting his phone away.

It was an annoying person to talk to. But he was also a customer, so Ichika sort of had to.

"Aren't you going to get that?" Houki asked.

"Nah. I'm in the middle of a conversation with a friend. They can wait."

Ichika would call the guy back later and claim his phone had been dead or something.

Houki blushed and started nervously playing with her hair.

"Oh. I see. I guess we are still friends then, aren't we?"

"Of course," Ichika confirmed. "Unless you don't want to be."

"Of course not!" She vehemently denied, before her voice suddenly got much softer. "I just wanted to be sure."

Houki let out a relieved sigh.

Then they were interrupted by the bell. Break time was over and it was time to go back to class.

"Guess we should get back then, huh?" Ichika said.

"Yeah. I guess we should."

"Well it was great seeing you again Houki. I'll talk to you later, yeah?"

"Y-yeah."

* * *

Ichika discretely glanced around the classroom.

Ms. Yamada was in the middle of teaching, and all of his classmates were paying attention to her.

He could probably get away with what he was about to do.

Just in case though, he intended to disguise the action as much as he could. His sister was in the room, after all. So he didn't want to do anything that looked too suspicious.

He had kept what he could do a secret from her all this time. And he wasn't about to give it away now, so easily.

Ichika casually picked up his textbook and then in a carefully choreographed motion, placed one hand on his cheek with his elbow propped up on his newly replaced desk, adopted a normal expression that wouldn't look suspicious, and flipped through all the pages in his textbook in less than 5 seconds.

For all anyone else could tell, he had just been a curious student quickly skimming through the textbook to see how many pages it had.

He had been holding up all the pages in a coiled manner, and using his thumb, allowed them to escape his grasp one at a time, with gravity doing most of the work in leafing through them all.

It had looked totally natural, and nobody, not even his sister, saw the action as suspicious.

If someone had _really _been paying attention however, they would have noticed one particular oddity.

His eyes had been closed throughout the process. That had been the only _slightly _suspicious part about what he had just done. But since nobody saw that particular detail, Ichika managed to get away with doing what he just had.

Something truly amazing had happened in that moment. Something that bordered on the supernatural. And it was without a doubt, Ichika's greatest secret.

Ichika had a special ability. One that he had accidentally stumbled upon when he was 6 years old. An eye based ability that he could turn on and off at will.

He had no idea why he had it. Nothing concrete anyway. He had some theories… but nothing confirmed.

He knew how he had 'unlocked' it though. If that's even the right word. The sequence of events that had triggered the ability for the first time. But other than that, he was pretty lacking in the information department.

But he certainly had learned how to use them. And with this power he had secretly mastered over the last decade, every last word in the entire textbook had been burned into his brain during those 5 seconds he spent flipping through the pages. The book was now useless to him. Every last piece of useful information that could be gleaned from its pages, had been.

With nothing more to gain, Ichika reached into his mind again and mentally pressed the off switch behind his eyes. The phenomenal power within them dissipated immediately.

Ichika let out a sigh of relief.

Now all that was left was the kickback.

Ichika held back a wince as a splitting migraine went through him a moment later.

It lasted nearly two minutes. Two minutes of sheer agony in which it felt like his skull was being squeezed in a hydraulic press.

But then it was over.

After recovering from the aftershock, Ichika glanced around the room while he mentally reviewed the new information in his head.

His teacher was still teaching, and nobody had noticed what he had just done.

Reaching up with his hand, Ichika surreptitiously wiped the small stream of blood that he felt leaking out of his nose, and the small amount coming out of his eyes.

Needless to say, it was a very practiced motion.

He had been using this ability of his on a daily basis for almost 10 years now. And he had no intentions of stopping any time soon.

His eyes were pretty much the sole reason why he had been able to accomplish so much at such a young age. He could learn almost anything he saw with them, instantly. And since he used them so often, he was very used to managing the painful side effects without anyone else noticing.

Ichika spent the rest of the class ignoring the teacher, since she was just reviewing the information he had just learned.

* * *

"May I have a moment?"

Ichika's eyes snapped open as a new voice interrupted his thoughts.

For a moment, he felt a very sharp feeling of rage go through him at the interruption of his thoughts.

Nothing unusual. Just his violent urges commanding him to beat the shit out of whoever it was. He had felt like this thousands of times before. And he was so used to feeling these extreme bouts of rage, that there wasn't even a hint of any of his inner thoughts on his face.

He stared at the person with a bored gaze.

"Hm?"

She looked terribly offended at his lackluster response.

Ichika wanted to punch her square in the face after seeing her expression.

He could already tell that this was one of those prissy princess types, and that this would be an annoying conversation. He even had some idea on what she was going to say next.

"What sort of a response is that?! You should be honoured that I bothered speaking to you in the first place. Don't you think you should behave in a more―"

Ichika didn't hear the rest, as he was now out of earshot.

He had simply walked out of the room. During her spiel, she had closed her eyes in an attempt to strike some sort of condescending pose. Since her eyes had been closed however, Ichika had taken the opportunity to get up and leave since she hadn't been paying attention.

In his experience, it was best to simply not engage with people like that.

She'd probably be absolutely furious with him when she realized he was gone, and as a result, was speaking to thin air, but Ichika had spoken to people like that before. And from his experience with them, there was pretty much nothing he could ever do to make them change their opinions. So it was better to simply not even try.

It was break time anyway. So he didn't want to spend his free time listening to that random lady's bullshit.

He had some phone calls to make anyway.

Businesses didn't just run themselves, after all.

* * *

Ichika figured he'd give it one shot.

Whoever's bright idea it had been to get him to live at an all girls school should definitely be fired. Going there was one thing, but actually having to _live _there...

Especially since he was supposed to have a roommate. Doing the math, this meant that his roommate would be a woman.

But still, he figured he'd give it one single shot. If his roommate ended up being laidback, and a decent person, maybe he'd actually agree with it. If not, he'd walk out of the school. Rules be damned. He'd just commute then. Or get a nearby hotel room to stay at or something.

It's not like he was strapped for cash or anything. And even though it was technically against school rules to do so, he had a team of world class lawyers a phone call away. If he started throwing some weight around, he would get his way.

Room 1025.

He opened the door and stepped inside.

'_Huh. Nice place.'_

No roommate though.

For a moment, he saw this as a good sign. Maybe someone up top actually had some common sense and had given him his own room after all. That'd be nice.

His hopes dropped like a stone a moment later when he heard a voice coming from the bathroom.

"Is someone out there?"

Ichika's eyes were very powerful tools. They had completely optimized the way his mind operated in everyday situations. So in a single instant, he had managed to deduce a huge amount of information with their abilities. Not only did he recognize the exact tone that the voice was speaking in, allowing him to identify who it was, but he was reasonably sure about how the next few moments would play out.

He had blinked exactly one time upon hearing the voice. In that instant, he had flashed his eye ability. With it, the computation power of his mind had gone up several orders of magnitude.

He had long since mastered the ability of echolocation. The ability to translate the sounds around him into a 3d model of his surroundings. But with the power of his eyes, he could dial this up to an insane degree.

A complete 3d model of the entire interior of the room had been downloaded into his head, including the wireframe structure of the interior of the bathroom, a place he shouldn't be able to even see because of the fact that the door to it was both closed and locked, and he wasn't even facing in that direction.

And he could also see both the current position and state of the occupant.

At least, he could see the 3d geometry. But the colours, and textures couldn't be picked up with this technique. So even though he knew Houki was currently wrapping herself in a towel, and was naked underneath it, he couldn't actually see anything inappropriate with this ability. So he hardly saw it as peeping.

The surface of her skin appeared fuzzy and unfocused with this technique, so he couldn't see any details. It was as if he could see her silhouette, but in 3d. So he could make an educated guess on what she was doing at the moment, but couldn't actually see anything he shouldn't.

All based off the tiny variations in the air currents in the room that his eyes allowed him to see, and his incredibly advanced echolocation ability.

Based on this, and the speed of his friend and apparent roommate Houki, as she approached the bathroom door from the inside, he was able to instantly calculate that he would not be able to leave the room before she left the bathroom.

He probably could do it if he leapt into action and immediately sprinted out the door, but he wouldn't be able to do so silently. Houki would suddenly hear a flurry of rustling, and it would be super suspicious.

Besides, this was his room too. He wasn't going to run out the door. Even if she was careless enough to come out of the bathroom wearing only a towel.

So instead, he'd simply prepare himself for what he knew she would do.

She wasn't a very rational person, all things considered. Logic just didn't seem to get along with her very well. Particularly when she felt vulnerable. So she'd probably fly off the handle and attack him because that's what she always did in situations like these.

But there was a pair of wooden practice swords in front of him. He'd simply pick one of them up and disarm her with it when she inevitably tried to attack him with the other one.

And then just to give her as much privacy as possible, he wouldn't turn in her direction at all. He had no intentions of peeping on her, even though everything that was about to happen was going to be almost entirely her fault.

So with a slightly irritated sigh, Ichika accepted the events that were about to occur, and his eyes began attempting to predict exactly how Houki would attack him.

"Oh hey. You must be my roommate. I look forward to having your company this year. Sorry for meeting you like this but I just got out of the shower."

"My name is Houki Shinonono."

She immediately froze in place, as expected.

Even though Ichika wasn't facing her at all, and was instead looking out the window, he could still tell what she was doing.

There was an annoying, prolonged, awkward silence.

"I-Ichika?"

Ichika, being who he was, decided that he didn't like awkward silences and would try to break it. Maybe give Houki the opportunity to gather at least some of her dignity again.

"Do you make it a habit of meeting other people without any clothes on?" Ichika asked. "Even if I had been a girl, that's pretty weird, isn't it? You should probably turn back around and go change while I still have my back turned."

"W-what the hell are you doing in here?! Get out!"

The confrontational side of him was now riled up and ready to go.

"No thanks," Ichika denied. "This is my room. I think I'll stay here."

"Your room?! This is my room!"

"Well then do the math. Clearly someone up top thought it'd be a good idea to make us roommates."

Houki let out a crazy, furious shout as she leapt towards one of her swords.

Ichika sighed.

Things could just never be easy with her. But at least she was predictable in her irrationality. While he still had the opportunity, Ichika calmly picked up the other sword. Since Houki was leaping in front of him, if he didn't pick one up now, she would block his access to it.

Houki picked up her sword, still in her towel, and charged him head on.

Ichika closed his eyes.

He hadn't seen Houki in a few years now, and so he was not sure about just how much she had improved since then. So he intended to use his special eyes just in case she had somehow surpassed his base level of skill during that time.

It was definitely cheating, using such an overpowered ability on someone wearing nothing but a towel, but he had never lost to Houki before, and didn't intend to start now.

Houki swung at him with her sword, and then time slowed to a halt as Ichika's eyes did their job.

They painted an exact, perfect picture about how to counter Houki's move as minimalistically, and efficiently as possible. All behind his closed eyelids.

If Ichika had used his special ability while his eyelids were open, a very noticeable flash of light would have appeared in his irises. So to hide this light from others, he only used them in public whenever he closed them. That would stop the light from being visible, but would not hinder his vision significantly as he could easily see through his own closed eyelids.

Processing the information given to him by his eyes, he noticed two things. The first was that this was indeed, overkill. He could have beaten her without his eyes. But since he was already using them, he continued to do so. The second thing he noticed was that there was a single window, about a millimeter in width, that if he struck it, would cause Houki's sword to bounce right out of her hand.

That was simply how the trajectories worked out. Houki's hand was still slightly slippery from stepping out of the shower. And she hadn't quite grasped the handle of her sword as well as she could have. Which left her vulnerable to a counterattack.

Realistically, almost nobody in the entire world had the precision required to perform such a maneuver. The timing was too precise. The window, too narrow. Like balancing a single sheet of paper on it's edge and having it not tip over.

But Ichika, with the power of his eyes behind him, was definitely able to pull it off.

Houki, however, would probably never grasp just how precise this strike was going to be.

Ichika almost grinned as he took the opening.

It was terrifyingly precise.

Even though it had looked like a completely uncoordinated, random swing, the precision behind it had been otherworldly.

_Clack!_

And exactly as his eyes had predicted, Houki's sword went flying across the room, out of her reach. Then he placed the tip of his sword on her collarbone.

Houki gasped, and there was an intense moment of silence.

"Still full of openings I see? Nice to see nothing's changed," Ichika said.

"Wha―? How did you―?"

Houki looked back in the direction of where her practice sword had flown in astonishment. Then she looked at her now empty hand in disbelief.

For someone of her skill level to be totally disarmed in one move was a ridiculous notion. But it had happened.

"How the hell did you do that?!"

Ichika had been prepared for the question and answered it immediately.

"Lucky strike."

He knew that Houki absolutely _hated _it when he gave her that answer. He used to give it to her all the time when they were kids whenever he beat her. And she absolutely hated it because of the fact that he got 'lucky' a lot. In fact, he got a 'lucky' victory in every single match they had ever had together. All 200+ of them.

She had never won against him. Not ever. And Houki had to know by now that his 'lucky strikes' were just bullshit excuses to avoid answering her questions. She'd have to be braindead to not know this by now.

But it didn't matter. Houki hated that answer, Ichika knew it, and that was why he gave it to her now. He was still a little annoyed with her for attacking him, and feeling more than a little vindictive. So a good, solid dig like that was something he just couldn't say no to.

As expected, Houki immediately recognized the infuriatingly familiar response and glared daggers at him for giving it to her yet again. Six years was not long enough for her to have forgotten.

She hadn't liked it one bit.

'_Good,' _Ichika thought. '_Take that, Houki.'_

Despite Houki's glare, she didn't actually reply. She must have known that nothing she could say at the moment would help. She knew that she couldn't win an argument on this matter when Ichika chose to dig in his heels and start to give her the run around. He was stubborn when he wanted to be. And Houki knew this more than anyone.

They had gone through this routine hundreds of times.

Houki's only winning move was to not play. And they both knew it.

"So then," Ichika broke the silence after his attempt to bait Houki into a pointless, though highly entertaining argument had failed.

"So then…?" She repeated, confused.

"Are you planning to get dressed any time soon, or are you seriously just _that _determined to get me to see you naked?" Ichika asked simply, as if he were inquiring about the weather.

Houki's whole face lit up a brilliant shade of red. It got so bad that it reached her scalp.

"D-don't look! Turn around!"

Ichika pinched the bridge of his nose in irritation. A mannerism he had picked up from his sister.

"Fine, whatever. I'm going to take a walk."

Then he left the room.

* * *

An awkward silence filled the air.

Houki was thankfully wearing actual clothes this time, so that was a step up from before.

The two of them were sitting down on their respective beds facing each other. Neither had said a word since Ichika had come back.

Eventually, however, Houki had had enough of the silence.

"You requested this room, didn't you?!" She accused.

Ichika was about to object, and attempt to explain to her how baseless that accusation was... but then he remembered that this was Houki. He wouldn't make any headway if he tried to do that. Making an attempt at logically explaining something to her would be pointless.

Instead, in his experience, the only way to win with her was to frustrate the hell out of her until she just gave up. The best way to do that? The tried and true method of digging in his heels, denying everything she said, and then accusing her of doing the very things that she accused him of. Lie to her face openly and blatantly, and derail the conversation as much as humanly possible.

"What are you talking about?" Ichika replied. "This is my room. Clearly, you're the one who requested to be here."

Houki glared at him immediately.

"How could you possibly think that?!" She shouted.

Ichika ignored how hypocritical that response was, and continued on.

"I was here first," Ichika lied overtly.

"What the hell?!" Houki objected. "No you weren't! I was here way before you! You even saw me walk out of the bathroom!"

"I saw you walk into the room after I arrived." Ichika said. "That makes you the intruder no matter how you look at it."

Houki's jaw dropped at the ridiculous claim.

Then she stood up, and adopted an '_I'm gonna skin you alive with my bare hands,' _expression.

Her bangs shadowed her face.

Ichika raised an eyebrow as he waited for her next retort.

Houki's fists clenched.

But after a few moments... she didn't say anything more.

'_Is she actually learning?' _Ichika asked himself.

This was interesting. After the hundreds of arguments they had had in the past, it looked like she was finally learning something. Try to fuck around and piss him off, and Ichika will fuck you up right back _harder_.

Houki liked to falsely accuse. Actually, she liked to pull a lot of bullshit when she was worked up. And every time she did, without fail, Ichika would run her into the ground. It didn't even matter if she was right, or if she made good points. If she acted in bad faith, Ichika _would _retaliate.

He'd shut that shit down. Even if Houki was totally right about everything, it wouldn't matter. He'd simply act like a gigantic moron, make a bunch of shit up, drag her down to his level, and then beat her with experience. She fell into it every time. And Ichika would keep doing this whenever Houki went off, all in the hopes that one day, she'd learn to stop pulling her bullshit.

Have an honest, genuine discussion, or get dragged down into a pointless argument that went nowhere. If she didn't want to play by the rules, then she would get buried in a pile of shit.

But Ichika had never expected this long term strategy to actually make any headway. Houki was just too tough a nut to crack. If what he was seeing now was any indication though, then it might finally be working after all these years.

"You still want to keep playing this game?" Ichika asked, a barely noticeable, vicious edge in his tone. "You'll lose again."

Houki looked at him with a conflicted expression on her face.

"Sorry," she finally said.

"Sorry…?" Ichika replied, surprised that Houki had actually said that.

"For accusing you like that," Houki clarified. "I regretted it as soon as I said it. I was just frustrated…"

"Well, alright then," Ichika replied after a moment or two.

"So then what happened?" Houki asked, as if the previous back and forth hadn't happened. "If you didn't request to be here, was it just a coincidence?"

"My guess is that this was my sister's doing," Ichika explained.

"Chifuyu?"

"Yeah. She probably set this whole thing up with good intentions, hoping to set me up with a roommate that was a friend so I wouldn't be stuck with some random girl I had never met before."

"I… guess that makes more sense," Houki reluctantly agreed.

'_You see Houki?' _Ichika thought. '_Isn't it so much more productive to actually talk about our problems instead of throwing crazy accusations around?'_

"Honestly, I don't really mind at all," Ichika said. "Though I'd have preferred if my sister had let me know that in advance."

Ichika really didn't mind. Houki may be annoying to be around whenever she was worked up. But she was also his friend. One of the very few that he had. She was very likely the only person in the whole school, besides his sister anyways, who he wouldn't mind having as a roommate.

And he had to admit, that even when Houki was being annoying, Ichika found it incredibly entertaining to see how angry he could make her. It was a hobby. And even putting all that aside, hanging out with her in the times she wasn't worked up, outweighed the times when she was.

"But anyway, do you have a problem with it?" Ichika asked.

"Yes!" She shouted.

Ichika raised an eyebrow.

"Boys and girls do not share rooms with each other! Not after age 7!" Houki explained.

'_That is a weirdly specific piece of information,'_ Ichika thought.

But he saw the point she was making.

"Alright then," Ichika replied. "That is a fair point, I suppose. So I'll tell you what. It's late now, so student services is closed, but they open up again early tomorrow morning. So tomorrow, come with me when I go down there, and we can have this whole thing sorted out before lunch."

If it was such a big problem, then he'd just get a different room. He didn't mind. If his next roommate didn't work out either, then he'd just go back to his original plan and get a place outside the school.

"Do you think we can last one night living together without getting into a fight?" Ichika asked.

"F-fine!"

Houki, looking beyond frustrated, humphed and turned away.

* * *

"I thought that you said you didn't like Kendo."

Houki broke the silence.

They were both lying in their respective beds, facing away from each other.

Ichika had his phone in his hand, attention glued to the screen, while Houki had been content with ignoring him until now.

He had said that to her a long time ago. That he didn't like it very much at all.

And it was true. But it was true by technicality. His views on the subject were far more nuanced than a simple yes or no answer to that.

He was surprised by it though. Houki's comment. Clearly she still felt a bit salty that he had defeated her in an instant just as easily as he had when they had both been kids.

"I don't," Ichika replied.

'_...Sort of,'_ he amended in his head.

"And yet you've clearly still kept up with your practice," Houki pointed out, sounding irritated.

"So what?" Ichika asked.

"So… why are you still practicing it if you don't even enjoy it?!"

Oh yeah. She was definitely irritated about that. It probably stung her pride a good bit that somebody who doesn't even like Kendo can absolutely destroy her at it any day of the week. Especially when she spends hours every single day dedicated to improvement.

"That's a very complicated answer that I don't think I can give a short explanation for," Ichika explained. "Basically, I don't like Kendo, but practice battles are amazing."

"What does that mean?" Houki asked. "Those are the same thing!"

"I disagree."

"Why?"

"Kendo has rules."

"So what?"

"Practice battles don't."

"Why does that matter?"

"That's the heart of it, Houki. It's the fundamental reason why I quit in the first place."

"That doesn't make any sense! You even became the national champion! And what about all those times we sparred as kids?! You didn't seem to feel that way then!"

"You're right, " Ichika grinned. "Those spars of ours were amazing."

"Okay. Clearly, I'm missing something here," Houki said.

"I think so too."

"So… what then?" She asked. "You used to like it, but don't anymore?"

"Nah, I never liked it."

"You aren't making any sense, Ichika!"

"I am though, actually. You're just painting a black and white picture for yourself in your head and expecting me to fall into it somehow. The real world isn't that simple."

"Then explain it to me!" She shouted.

"The thing you're missing is the fact that what we did back then, wasn't even Kendo at all."

"What are you talking about? Almost all we ever did was spar."

Ichika sighed.

"Alright," Ichika said. "I'll try and explain then."

"So this is a very subtle, but very important point that I hope I can get you to understand," Ichika began. "What we did back then, most of it wasn't even Kendo. Think back to all of those spars that we had. Do you still remember them?"

"Of course I do," Houki replied.

"That wasn't Kendo," Ichika claimed. "Almost none of it was. Try and imagine what would happen if any of those spars we had, had happened during the middle of a tournament, or an official match."

"Illegal move after illegal move," Ichika continued. "The refs would have been screaming at us. Both of us would have been disqualified so quickly during any of those matches."

"We were just kids back then," Houki pointed out. "And we didn't really know what we were doing."

"I don't believe that," Ichika replied.

"What do you mean?"

"Those fights we had back then… those were some of the best times I ever had."

They were in fact one of the highlights of his childhood. Once he had discovered that he was different, and had weird eye powers, and that he could use those abilities to get stronger, he had found spars like the ones they used to have to be exhilarating.

Even if Houki had never been able to keep up at all. It was still fun. There was a certain degree of entertainment that he could get by immensely holding back and doing incredibly subtle moves to win instead of just flattening her in an instant.

He had learned so much from those battles. Not due to Houki pushing him, but on the contrary, by Houki being so weak in comparison that he could try insane moves right in the middle of the fight and get away with experimenting.

"Those weren't Kendo matches," Ichika explained. "They were practice battles. And while those might sound like the same thing to you, this is the absolute heart of why I stopped practicing Kendo in the first place."

"Kendo comes with a set of rules," Ichika continued. "You can't hold the sword this way. The only way to win is by scoring points this way. You aren't allowed to do this. You aren't allowed to do that. That move is illegal. So is that one."

"It is way too restrictive," Ichika said. "There is no creativity. Innovation is stifled, and you get punished for trying new things. There is one way to fight and you have to stick to it or else."

Perhaps that was an oversimplification, but it was the feeling that he had always run into. With the ridiculously precise combat moves he was capable of pulling off with the power of his eyes behind him, he could do so much more than what Kendo allowed.

So he had quit while he was ahead, and moved on to other things.

"That is, and has always been, my opinion of Kendo in general. Even back when we were kids. And it is why I ultimately quit," Ichika explained. "I did my best to give it a fair shake in order to try and understand why others such as yourself found it so interesting, but I just never came up with anything in the end."

"I only ever became the national champion because I had superior reaction speed to my opponents," Ichika pointed out. "Skill almost never played a part at all."

He had not been able to showcase any of his actual abilities. Not in any real sense, anyways.

And where was the fun in that?

"It was just all so… pointless. I could just never see whatever it was that you saw in the discipline," Ichika concluded. "But with those battles we used to have… we threw out the rules. We invented new strategies, learned a bunch of crazy moves that would never be allowed in an official match, and the point of it was to have fun. To be free."

"So yeah," he said. "I quit Kendo. But I never put down the sword."

"And I knew that I made the right decision when I met a professional fencer from France years later, and promptly had my ass handed to me by the guy. There's a lot more out there than what Kendo offers."

"And that is why I quit. I realized, as I finished that final match in that tournament I won, that true strength comes from acknowledging the fact that not all techniques and sword styles are created equal. Some disciplines stifle growth. And you have to be ready to throw out everything that doesn't work, no matter how attached you are to it, in favour of what does if you want to keep improving. And you have to be willing to listen to the advice and the perspectives of others."

"Practicality should always take precedence over tradition," he said. "Kendo feels like the opposite to me."

"So it isn't for me. But I have no problem with other people practicing it. Like I said, perhaps you can see something that I can't in it. But who knows? Hopefully that makes some kind of sense," Ichika finished.

Houki's eyes were wide, and there were several moments of silence as Ichika continued to stare at the screen on his phone.

"No, no, it does," Houki assured him. "I understand exactly what you're saying. I just never imagined that that was the reason."

Ichika was surprised.

This was Houki right here… understanding a nuanced and subtle point?

Was he even awake right now?

"I've never looked at it that way before," Houki claimed.

"Well, you enjoy Kendo right?" Ichika asked, wanting to see how far he could take a conversation like this with her.

"Of course."

"Is it really Kendo that you enjoy?" Ichika pressed. "Or is it just combat in general?"

Those two things were _very _different.

"I… I don't know."

"You should give it some thought," Ichika suggested. "The French have some damn good fencers. And there's some pretty cool ways to get an actual Katana to imitate some of their tricks, too. Totally illegal ways of course if you tried any of it in an official match. But they sure come as a surprise against an unsuspecting opponent in the middle of a real fight."

Most of said tricks could probably only be performed by him, however.

His sister could probably pull them off as well, but that was just because Chifuyu was Chifuyu. The rules didn't apply to her and she could do pretty much anything.

"C-can you show me?" Houki eventually asked, hesitantly.

Ichika considered the idea.

Eventually… his curiosity won out. Houki had actually listened to what he had said. Without objecting or cutting him off. And she had _understood._

This was unprecedented.

Could she actually learn?

Perhaps he was being unfair to her. But she tended to be extremely rigid in her thought processes, and didn't react well to opposing views. So he had given up on her a long time ago.

But… maybe she was different now.

"You want to have a spar?" Ichika asked.

"No," She said. "I want to have a practice battle."

Ichika grinned. He was always down for a practice battle. A Kendo match? Not so much. She had very carefully chosen her words there. And Ichika definitely approved.

Ichika immediately stood up and turned the lights on.

Then he stared at Houki.

'_Different now, indeed,'_ he thought

"Let's go then," he said.

"Now?" Houki questioned. "I-it's 10 o'clock. We have school tomorrow."

"Excuses," he said. "Come on. We can head up to the roof where the sound won't bother any of our classmates in the rooms around us. Unless you're too tired?"

"O-okay."

* * *

Houki had to suppress a giggle as she and Ichika snuck through the hallways of the school like a pair of bandits and finally returned to their room.

She was completely out of breath from the match that the two of them had just had on the school's roof.

But it had been completely worth it.

They had broken curfew by coming back so late, but they had managed to avoid all of the cameras and nobody had noticed.

Upon making it into their room once more she simply could not wipe the genuine smile off of her face.

That match had been magical.

The two of them on top of the school roof battling each other with nothing held back just as they had used to do as kids.

She understood now what Ichika had been saying about all of the rules that Kendo practitioners had to abide by. There was no way any of what they had just done would have been permissible in a real match.

But she didn't care at all.

It had been an amazing experience that she would never forget for the rest of her life.

Just thinking about it made her heart go crazy, and her cheeks warm.

She hadn't stood a chance against him, but it had been the most fun that she had had in years.

She just had one problem left on her mind, now.

How was she going to backtrack?

Earlier, she had said that being roommates with him was going to be a problem. She hadn't really meant it then, but she was probably going to have to convince him that switching rooms wasn't necessary anymore.

* * *

**AN: I have no beta reader for this story. So there may be errors.**


	5. Chapter 5: Orimura Ichika, The Gamer

**Disclaimer: I don't own Infinite Stratos in any sense.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

Ichika's eyes were crazy and he knew almost nothing about them. That being said, he wasn't entirely ignorant on the subject. He had been able to make a few inferences and educated guesses about them over the years. But for the most part, everything he had learned had just led him to more questions.

He was pretty sure that it had to do with his genetics, as clearly something was pretty wonky with them now that he could pilot an IS. But he was also fairly certain that the full story was dark, horrifying, and incredibly bloody. He didn't have a whole lot of concrete proof on that front, but that seemed to be where all of the evidence he did have was pointing.

Back when he was six years old, he had unlocked this eye ability by accident. It had been late during the evening one night, and he had been watching an anime series that he had really had no business watching. It had been rated for teens and up due to the extreme violence. It certainly had not been meant for six year olds like him, but his sister hadn't been around at the time to stop him from watching it, so he had continued on.

He had become extremely invested in that show. The main character had reminded him of himself in a lot of ways. Not due to being super heroic or anything like that, but due to the fact that the main character had a sister just like he did, and the two of them had been very close. It had been a bond that Ichika had hoped that he'd have with his own sister one day, and that was probably why the show had resonated so much with him.

During the final episode of the series however, the main character's sister had died a pretty brutal death, sacrificing herself to save her brother. And Ichika didn't really know what had happened to him when he had witnessed that scene, even today. Some wires had gotten crossed in his brain or something, because in that moment, he hadn't seen that character, Mio, dying on a television screen anymore. He had seen his real sister, Chifuyu, in her place.

It hadn't been a 2d anime character sacrificing herself for another 2d anime character. It had been his beloved sister sacrificing herself for real. For him. And it had been so vivid and brutal, that he had completely broken down after seeing it.

That anime had had a _ton _of gore in it. Mio's final scene had been an absolute _mess_, to say the least. She had gotten completely _wrecked _on-screen. To the point that clean-up crews carrying mops and buckets would have been needed afterwards. The animators had not pulled their punches and Mio had looked like she had swallowed a bomb.

Even to this day, seeing that scene was one of Ichika's most vivid memories, and he still had nightmares about it all these years later.

He could sort of laugh about it now, though. In a self-deprecating way. Some dumb kid like him accidentily watching extremely violent, gory anime and getting traumatized by it? If that had happened to anyone else, he'd have laughed in their face about it immediately after hearing the story. But it definitely sucked when it was him. Even though he could laugh at the concept of being traumatized by a dumb anime, his subconscious mind didn't find it funny in the least, and traces of that trauma still remained. It had practically destroyed his mind seeing that, and on that day, it had even caused him to pass out in shock.

But then he had woken up the next morning to find out that all had been right with the world. His sister Chifuyu had been just fine after he had seen Mio's death, because everything that he had seen had been on a television screen. The world spun on as it always had. His sister had even called him later that day and they had talked for a while about normal stuff.

Superimposing his sister into that scene in place of Mio had all been some sort of crazy hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation, and the overactive imagination of an overly invested child.

That should have been the end of the incident. But it hadn't been. Instead, he had noticed quite quickly upon waking up that there was a nasty and painful sensation behind his eyes that he couldn't explain. They had felt like they had been on fire. And a quick trip to the bathroom mirror was all it had taken for him to find out that something was seriously wrong with him.

If his sister had been home at the time, she probably would have freaked out. Or she would have done the Chifuyu equivalent of that, anyway. It was hard to overlook blazing scarlet eyes bright enough to light up rooms, after all.

But since Chifuyu had been training so hard at the time for the first Mondo Grosso, she hadn't seen Ichika again until after he had already figured out how to turn his eyes off. And Since Ichika hadn't wanted to worry her and make her lose out on competing, he had decided to remain quiet about the whole thing.

The original plan had been to tell her about them after that tournament. But when it was over, something else had come up that had stopped him from telling her. And then something else after that. He kept procrastinating that conversation, kicking the rock further and further down the road until eventually, he had woken up five years later. He had never told her, and the rest was history.

During those first few weeks when he had first unlocked them, he had done a lot of panic-Googling, trying to figure out if anyone else had ever had any of the weird symptoms that he had. But nothing had fit. Allergies, eye cancer, Leukokoria, Coats' Disease, none of it had matched.

Nobody else had ever been recorded having these eyes, so he had had to look elsewhere to find any useful information. Perhaps ironically, he had ended up turning to various anime and manga series across the internet for this. Because while there may not have been any real people who could do what he could, there were plenty of fictional anime characters with weird ocular based abilities similar to his own. And he had ended up turning to these resources to try and understand his eyes.

It had been a treasure trove. Plenty of these fictional anime characters had entire story arcs about learning how to use their eye powers. How to turn them on and off at will, how to use them in creative ways, and even the reasons why they had their powers in the first place.

A lot of that information had applied to his situation.

The common theme that Ichika had noticed throughout most of these fictional series, however, was that a lot of the characters' eye abilities were extremely dark in nature, often requiring them to witness some incredibly violent event first-hand to unlock them. Like seeing a family member or close friend getting brutally murdered right in front of them, for example.

Which really fit in well with the way he had unlocked his own eye ability. He had basically hallucinated that Mio was Chifuyu, and had sort of tricked his own mind into bypassing this condition on a technicality. To unlock the power without ever having to lose his sister at all.

This was his best guess so far as to what had happened that day. He wasn't certain that this was the case, but it was his leading explanation. And he received further confirmation of this theory upon learning how to actually turn this ability on and off at will.

He had to vividly imagine his sister being brutally murdered to do so. Every single time.

This was the sort of ability that he'd expect an anime supervillain to have. Something that someone with a brutal upbringing filled with pain and loss was supposed to have. Or someone evil. Not someone like him who had a loving sister, some great friends, and who had never really lost anything.

So from all of this information he was fairly confident in a few things. He likely had a very violent family. To the point that his sister would be considered tame by comparison. He was probably the child of a pair of mass murdering psychopaths with a weird family bloodline, one that simply wasn't recorded in history.

This was also likely where _that _side of him came from. Ichika's inner psychopath. He was almost certain that it was tied to his eyes because he definitely didn't remember ever having any of these psychotic thoughts before unlocking them.

It was crazy. On some days he felt that human beings were these amazing creatures worthy of his utmost respect. But then on other days, he planned out how to exterminate them all. He was like the most extreme case of bipolar disorder in history. But unlike all the other nutjobs who just _thought _about killing everyone around them, Ichika actually had all the tools at his disposal to pull it off whenever he wanted to.

He was dangerous, and he terrified even himself. If he ever lost control over his mind and gave into those urges, a lot of people would die very quickly.

But he was also a practical person. He had these weird eyes and they weren't going to go away. All of Ichika's childish attempts to get rid of them years ago had failed. So if they weren't leaving on their own, he might as well just make use of them. They were powerful tools.

But he still couldn't shake the feeling that this ability of his was supposed to have been earned through extreme hardship. As if God himself had granted him this power, but had also decided that he could never use it unless his sister died first. And only if he had seen her die personally. First hand.

It'd be a total dick move of course, if God had done something like that to him, but it's what it felt like. That was how he was _supposed _to have unlocked it.

But nope. He had watched an anime one time when he was six, and had slipped through the cracks on a technicality, cheating God himself.

* * *

"Are you kidding me right now?" Ichika asked with a flat stare, after hearing the summary of recent events during his absence. He had just returned to the academy and now he had to put up with this bullshit now?

"Why would I be?" Chifuyu replied. The two of them were alone in her office.

"But I wasn't even in the room at the time!" Ichika rightfully pointed out.

"And who's fault is that?"

"Oh, come on! You can't just decide stuff about me like this when I'm not there to object to it!"

"That's exactly what I can do, actually."

Ichika stared at his sister in disbelief. If he didn't know her so well, he probably would have missed the tiny crinkling of her eyes, and her slightly upturned lips, indicating that despite the fact that she was doing an admirable job of keeping a professional expression on her face, his sister was actually highly amused at his current situation.

Ichika had had to negotiate with the school's board members before agreeing to be enrolled to allow him to take certain days off in order to continue to run his businesses. Some of what he got into had serious impacts on world governments and he couldn't afford to miss certain obligations. So this agreement had been necessary.

For the past few days, Ichika had been absent from school on one of these outings. And apparently, during this time that he had been away, a vote had taken place as to who the class representative would be. Ichika had of course, been nominated and won by a landslide. Which was frankly, stupid. It was a stupid situation, and he hated the fact that it had happened.

He didn't want to be the class representative at all! It was too much work for no benefit! But since he hadn't been there at the time when the vote had taken place, he had not been in a position to step down, or so his sister was claiming. So he had been forced to accept by default.

But the stupidity did not end with just that. Oh, no. It had been taken up to the next level. Some crazy British lady named Cedric, or something, had apparently objected to his appointment to this position. An action that had initially put the girl in Ichika's good graces. Because it was stupid how he had been forced to accept simply for not being there to say no, and her pointing this obvious oversight out should have been a respectable move.

But Cedric hadn't done this. She had _challenged _him for it. And since the rules for electing class representatives had been designed by an absolute _walnut_, who had done a terrible job of it, it was decided that this challenge would go through. Cedric would duel him for the position that Ichika didn't even want.

Which was stupid. And it removed Cedric from his good graces. Especially after he learned that it was, in fact, the same prissy princess who had accosted him with her squeal-y voice earlier.

"You are to duel for the position of class representative in a week's time," Chifuyu reiterated. "I suggest that you prepare in the meantime."

"No."

There was a moment of silence.

"No?" Chifuyu raised an eyebrow at her brother's unexpected refusal. "What do you mean no? You can't refuse this request."

"Why not, though?" He asked.

"Because the duel has already been scheduled. You will be taking part in it."

"I understand that," Ichika replied. "But the part that you seem to be forgetting, oh sister of mine, is that I have no incentive to win. I don't want the position. So why should I fight for it? What will you do if I just don't show up? Disqualify me and declare my opponent the winner? That sounds great! Let's do that and skip all the hassle."

"You would forfeit a duel? That sounds awfully cowardly, wouldn't you agree?"

"Is it though? I see it as a victory. Giving up is the most efficient way to get what I want. The alternative would be to accept the duel and throw the match, or otherwise lose. That's just unnecessary work to get the same result anyway. And I don't care what people think about it."

"You don't care what your classmates will say if you forfeit without even trying?"

"Should I?"

* * *

Chifuyu frowned as she stared at her younger brother.

She hadn't expected him to back down so easily. She had figured that her brother's pride would have forced him to never back down from a direct challenge like that. Especially from someone as bratty as Cecilia Alcott.

Chifuyu had a bit of an ulterior motive for wanting this duel to take place. She was curious about her brother's abilities now, after her last test had only allowed her to get a lower bound estimate on them. So she wanted to see how fast he could pick up on being a pilot, and this was the perfect opportunity.

Cecilia would be an interesting measuring stick to gauge Ichika's potential. At least, that had been the plan. So she found it a little annoying that her brother had found a way to weasel out of it so easily.

She let out a sigh.

"Fine," She said. "You want an incentive to win? What do you want?" As long as it wasn't too outrageous, she might consider granting him a favour. If he went too far with it though, she'd put her curiosity aside right there and simply wait for another opportunity.

"Hang on, you are willing to actually offer me something to do this? Why do you want this to happen so much?"

"Because it's already been scheduled," she replied. "There will also be some high-profile spectators in attendance―"

"I instantly change my mind," Ichika interrupted.

Chifuyu blinked.

"You mean..."

"Yes. I have no further objections," Ichika declared. "I'll fight Cedric Alabaster in a week's time."

"Who?"

"The crazy lady."

"Cecilia Alcott."

"That definitely sounds a lot more like a girl's name, I'll admit."

"How did you even mess it up that badly? It hasn't been two minutes since I told it to you."

"Clearly, I wasn't listening."

"Right. Clearly. And is there any particular reason you'd like to share with me as to why you weren't listening to your teacher as she was speaking to you?"

"It was just her name that I blanked out on, Orimura sensei. I listened to everything else. But I just don't care what her parents decided to call her because it isn't important. She isn't important. So I don't see why knowing her name is worth the half second of effort it would require to learn it. She isn't worth that."

"She's your classmate."

"Have you listened to her speak?"

"...Fair point," she conceded. "Fine. But do try to at least put some effort into getting to know your peers. You'll be with them for the rest of the year."

"Sure. I'll put _some _effort in."

"Right. You're free to go, then."

"Right-o."

* * *

Chifuyu stared down at her desk for a while after her brother left, trying to figure out why he had changed his mind so swiftly. He had been doing an admirable job of weaseling out of the duel but then suddenly, he had spun back around and accepted, seemingly for no reason at all, and she didn't know why. So she was trying to figure it out.

Thirty seconds later, Chifuyu cursed in her empty office.

_That _was why. Her brother was an idiot. Same as usual. As soon as the slightest possibility of making his sister look bad presented itself, he completely reversed course on everything to ensure it didn't happen. She had mentioned VIPs attending the duel to watch, and she could predict the exact sequence of logical steps her brother had probably gone through upon hearing that.

'_If I forfeit, all the spectators will see me do so.'_

'_The VIPs are spectators.'_

'_Therefore the VIPs will know that Ichika Orimura, Chifuyu Orimura's brother, is a person who backs down from challenges.'_

'_And what would that say about Chifuyu?'_

Fuck. Chifuyu hadn't even meant to try and play that card on him. She knew that her brother would go to insane lengths to prevent himself from making her look bad in any conceivable way, but sometimes she underestimated the devious schemes he'd cook up to ensure he never did.

She let out a frustrated sigh.

Ichika had been extremely self conscious about making her look bad throughout his entire life. Chifuyu had known all about it, but she'd never been able to summon the courage to sit him down and explain to him that he didn't have to worry about stuff like that. She just wasn't very good with those sorts of touchy-feely conversations, so she had spent all of this time instead, secretly hoping that he'd eventually just get over it.

But clearly he hadn't. If anything, he had gotten worse about it.

* * *

"Those are some badass hairpins you got there," Ichika declared as he walked past some random blue haired girl he had never seen before. "I approve." He didn't even turn around to see what the girl looked like as he continued on. He had just noticed her funky hair ornaments in passing.

Ichika was satisfied now, though. He had just fulfilled his sister's request in putting _some _effort into getting to know his peers. Chifuyu had not quantified precisely how much effort he needed to put in, so he had interpreted that to mean that any non-zero amount would be acceptable. So an off-hand comment to one of them should be enough for the rest of the school year. He could now continue onwards on his quest in ignoring every last one of them.

Idly, he heard a ruckus stir up behind him as he rounded a corner.

"Eh?! Kanzashi?!"

"What was that about?!"

Ichika didn't hear anything else from them as he travelled out of earshot.

His phone vibrated in his pocket a moment later.

* * *

Ichika had an irritated scowl on his face as he walked towards his room.

He had just gotten a text message.

Some ass-hat in America had just beaten his world record time in Appleman and the Pancake of Justice. Ichika had been the previous record holder for fastest time completing that video game and had held that title for the past five years straight. But he had just gotten a notification that his time had been beaten by a whopping two seconds just a minute or so ago.

This would not stand at all. Ichika quickly navigated to his social media pages on his phone and sent out a quick update that he would make an immediate attempt to retake the lost record in a few minutes, and that he would be streaming as soon as he could. School was done for the day, and all of his out of school projects were bottlenecked and could not go faster than they were, so he had plenty of free time.

Some people in his position probably wouldn't consider it worth their time to reclaim a world record from a game that almost nobody had ever heard of before, but this was a matter of pride. Because Orimura Ichika was the best gamer in the world. It was an unofficial title, sure, but it was widely accepted as true.

He currently held the world record for most simultaneous world record speedruns held by one person. Which was a roundabout way of saying that he was better than everyone else at life in general. So every time one of his times was beaten by someone else, he had to retake it immediately. He had no choice.

"God-damn hillbilly bastard," he mumbled as he opened the door, and walked into his room. The Americans just couldn't leave his times alone.

Houki wasn't there at the moment. Looking at the time, this made sense. She was probably down at the cafeteria eating dinner, or perhaps practicing Kendo. That actually worked out nicely. Ichika could quickly take back his record and then meet up with her after. He grabbed his bag full of all the stuff he needed and headed back out.

* * *

It really hadn't taken long at all. First try, Ichika had reclaimed his record in that game.

He just loved how salty people got. Most speedrunners had to spend hours and hours and hours to get even a single decent run on whichever game they chose to play. But Ichika had a reputation of sitting down and getting solid runs unbelievably quickly and consistently. Usually, on the first or second try he'd be on world record pace. He had almost no dead runs, and man did people get mad about it. He had been accused of cheating so many times.

But he didn't.

Make no mistake, if he wanted to, Ichika could absolutely _dominate _the entire gaming community if he ever activated his eyes during the middle of a run. But he would not be able to get away with something like that. His runs would look way too robotic and perfect if he did. Without any human imperfections, there would be no way to convince anyone that he was actually legit.

It also wouldn't be any fun, either. Additionally, if he was going to make his eyes bleed and give himself a migraine, he wanted to be doing something constructive in exchange for the pain. Not beating someone in a video game.

Tens of thousands of people had just watched an hour long stream of him beating the crap out of a bunch of fruit themed enemies in record time, and of course, facing down the Pancake Champion himself at the end. An absolute demon, with notoriously brutal boss mechanics. But with Ichika's skills, it had been no problem at all.

Now he was standing over the panting form of Houki as she lay sprawled out on the floor, flushed and exhausted. They had just had a spar, and Ichika had pushed her to her limits during it.

"You improve fast," Ichika praised. "It's actually pretty amazing to watch."

Houki blushed furiously.

"I-Ichika…"

"Yeah?"

"Would you mind if we do this… more often? Like, every day? I haven't had any real challenges like this in a long time."

"Yeah, sure."

"In exchange…" Houki began, hesitantly. "I could… teach you a little about the IS. You know, if that's something that you think would help. I know you have that duel with Cecilia coming up and all…"

"Yeah, sure," Ichika agreed. "That actually sounds perfect. So... what? Were you thinking, practice matches in the morning, IS stuff in the evening?"

"Yeah!" Houki agreed wholeheartedly.

"I-I mean…" she backtracked, trying to make it sound like less of a big deal. "Yeah, that would work best."

"Sounds good." Ichika offered his hand to Houki. Blushing, she tentatively grabbed it, and Ichika pulled her up to her feet.

"Y-you've gotten really strong, Ichika."

"Eh, I like to think I do alright."

"If you fight like that against Cecilia, I don't think she'll stand a chance."

"I guess that depends on how easily sword fighting translates over to IS piloting. And on how much about that crazy machine I can pick up from you before then. Wouldn't you agree?"

Houki smiled at the comment, and the two of them headed back to their room.

* * *

**AN: I have no beta reader for this story. So there may be errors.**


	6. Chapter 6: The Plan

**Disclaimer: I don't own Infinite Stratos in any sense.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

'_Wow. This is really annoying,' _Ichika thought.

Ichika looked across the table at Houki and noticed that she too, was looking really frustrated. The two of them were sitting down at a lunch table in the cafeteria. However, they were not alone by any means. They were completely surrounded, in fact. Many of their classmates had swarmed them the instant they had been spotted. Or more accurately, as soon as he had been spotted.

"Hey Orimura-kun, do you want to grab some coffee sometime?"

"I have the best grades in my class, I can help you study!"

"My grades are better than yours, Shizuka, so I'd be way better at that than you."

"Why don't you come sit over here with me and my friends, Ichika?"

Everyone was trying to talk to him for some reason. It was annoying. His classmates back in middle school wouldn't have even dared to try something like this.

'_I guess that's the crappy thing about coming to a new school.'_

The violent reputation as a delinquent that he had worked so hard to build up was just gone now.

Finally, having had enough of the situation, Houki stood up, let out a frustrated _hmph!_ and turned and walked away. A pair of random girls Ichika had never seen before took Houki's newly vacant seat without hesitation.

Ichika just stared blankly at them as they chattered on.

* * *

Ichika closed the door to his and Houki's room after walking inside.

A complicated expression crossed Houki's face as Ichika took a seat on the bed across from her and looked in her direction. She turned away with a red face, looking frustrated.

Ichika just stared at her for a while.

"What?" Houki eventually asked after the silence dragged on for too long.

Ichika said nothing.

"Aren't you going to hang out with your groupies back in the cafeteria?"

Ichika said nothing.

"Stop looking at me like that!" Houki shouted.

"Are you scared of spiders?" Ichika abruptly questioned.

Houki blinked at the random inquiry.

"W-what does that have to do with anything?"

"Is that a yes?"

There was a moment of silence.

"No. I'm not afraid of spiders, Ichika." She had a '_what the hell are you talking about'_ look on her face as she explained this.

"Sweet," Ichika replied. "I'll be right back, then."

"Wait… what's going on?" Houki asked, seeing her friend get up to leave the room. "Ichika?!"

Ichika closed the door on her as he walked out of the room.

Houki replayed the conversation in her head a couple of times to see if she could make any sort of sense of it.

It was just completely random. But despite that, a small feeling of nervousness rose in her at what Ichika had asked. He had asked her if she was afraid of spiders, and then left as soon as she had said no. Saying he'll be right back. That worried her a little bit now, if she were being honest. What was he going to do with that information? She had no idea what Ichika was planning at all.

* * *

"What can I do for you, Orimura?" Chifuyu asked, as her brother sat down in her office.

"Can we bring pets to school?" Ichika asked.

"No."

"Okay, bye." Ichika stood up and left the room.

Chifuyu raised her eyebrow at the weirdly short conversation. She had not expected him to just leave after two sentences.

Confused, she tried to figure out what Ichika was planning this time. It made no sense to her why he would ask something like that. She was pretty sure that her brother didn't have any pets, but now that she thought about it a little bit more, she realized that she couldn't really be sure of that. It wasn't like she spent all that much time at their home. But even if Ichika did pick up a pet at some point, she didn't understand why he would want to bring it to school of all places.

A random thought struck her in that moment. Ichika was pretty famous, and was pretty active on social media. Chifuyu knew that a lot of people liked to show off their pets there as well. So maybe she could just Google her brother's name with the 'pet' keyword and get a result. It'd only take five seconds or so. So she pulled out her phone and typed it in.

"Are you kidding me right now?" Chifuyu asked herself with raised eyebrows as she scrolled through the images. It looked like she had just dodged a bullet or two by turning her brother down. There were hundreds of pictures of Ichika carrying around unusually large spiders in various photographs taken over the years. If she had said yes to her brother's question…

Chifuyu could predict exactly what Ichika's plan had been, now. He clearly didn't like to be bothered by other people. And nothing would get across the message to leave him alone better than carrying around a pet spider everywhere he went. Especially if that spider was giant, and hairy. So she could easily imagine the sheer pandemonium that that would have caused if he had followed through.

She was going to need to start keeping a closer eye on him. Even seemingly innocuous requests from him could have catastrophic consequences.

* * *

"Well, well. And what do we have here?" Cecelia asked, as she walked up to Ichika. "I do hope that you're ready to be defeated in our duel tomorrow."

Ichika continued eating his dinner without a word. He didn't even acknowledge the fact that Cecelia was there.

"Hey!" She slammed one of her hands onto the table, fed up. "How dare you ignore me you commoner! Do you have any idea who I am?! I am Cecelia Alcott! Britain's representative contender! And you will show me some…"

Cecelia paused her tirade dead in its tracks upon noticing an extremely disturbing sight. Several moments passed by in complete silence.

Ichika looked up at her after noticing this.

"Is there a problem?" he asked. "Weren't you saying something?"

Cecelia was white as a sheet.

"W-what is that thing?" She asked.

"What thing?"

"T-that thing," Cecelia pointed at the object, fear in her eyes. "On your shoulder."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Ichika lied. "If that's all you wanted to ask though, you can leave now."

"B-but…" Cecelia tried to speak up.

Ichika sighed. Then, like the rational and sane individual that he was, he reached into the jacket of his school uniform, and pulled out the 9-inch leg-span, Giant Huntsman Spider that he had stashed there earlier, and placed it gently down on the back of Cecelia's hand. Then he innocently looked up at her, matching her gaze, as if nothing of importance at all had just occurred.

The spider was about the size of a dinner plate. It was also very, very real.

Nothing more needed to be said.

Cecelia screamed. _Loud_.

* * *

She didn't bother him again.

Ichika grinned to himself.

_Genius. _Absolute fucking _genius_, this idea of his! He had had a problem these last couple of days. All of his classmates kept on swarming him. So like the engineer that he was, he had tried to look at this problem analytically and objectively in order to solve it.

Option A was to start swinging. Beat the crap out of a bunch of them, and reclaim his old reputation. But some of these girls had IS suits, and Ichika didn't want to get into a fight on that scale just yet. Not until he got his own personal IS and figured out how to use it, anyway.

So instead he had taken Option B instead.

It was important to note, however, that Option B was very different from his human race terminating Plan B. Operation Chick-Magnet, was Option B, and that was very different.

Magnets had two sides to them. There was the side that attracts, and the side that repels. Ichika had been interested in the repelling side in this analogy, though this was perhaps unclear from the name alone. Most people would probably misinterpret his intentions if they just heard the name of the operation, thinking that he was trying to attract women. To the contrary, he wanted them nowhere near him. So he'd use a magnet to push them away.

In any case, while brainstorming for this plan of his he had asked himself a simple question. '_What is something that is almost universally feared by all girls everywhere?'_

Spiders had come to mind almost immediately. And conveniently, Ichika had some experience handling them. He had used them in the past back in middle school as a similar deterrent strategy to get people to leave him alone, and it had worked wonderfully. But he had only made use of them back then in a limited fashion, mostly against bullies. He had never thought to actually bring one everywhere he went.

Unfortunately, however, Chifuyu had said that pets weren't allowed at the school. So Ichika had needed to put on his lawyering hat in order to figure out how to smuggle them in without breaking any official rules. So that had taken a bit of time. But after perusing through the school rules and documentation, he had figured out a workaround. And as soon as he had covered his ass, he had brought in two of his favourite spiders.

A 9-inch Giant Huntsman Spider, which he kept hidden in the jacket of his school uniform, and a half-pound Goliath Bird Eating Tarantula, which he kept on his right shoulder. That particular spider was currently curled up on itself. So it mostly just looked like a hairy mass of some sort. Which was probably why Cecelia hadn't been able to recognize what it was at first glance, and why Ichika had needed to pull out his backup spider to scare her off.

Both of these spiders of his held the title of being the biggest spider in the world. Only, they held them in different respective categories. The Bird-eater was the largest by mass, while the Giant Huntsman was the largest by leg span. So Ichika had not held back at all in his choices. The bigger, hairier, and faster they were, the better.

Cecelia had run away in horror. It was amazing. An absolutely _genius _strategy. And to top it all off, Houki had said that she wasn't scared of spiders. So the two of them would be able to talk in peace now.

* * *

Ichika opened up the door to his room and stepped inside.

"So where did you end up going?" Houki immediately asked, suspiciously.

"To pick up this guy of course," Ichika replied, showing off his bird-eater.

A lot of things happened in short succession after revealing his giant spider to his roommate.

Houki immediately screamed in terror. It was a sudden, carnal, hair-raising, "_I'm being ripped apart by an ax-murderer,"_ scream. The sort that you heard all the time in horror movies.

Ichika had never heard her shriek so loudly before, or in such a stereotypically feminine way. It was so unlike her. He had never seen Houki truly scared of anything before, so this turn of events actually surprised Ichika quite a bit.

Houki immediately _rocketed _to the opposite corner of the room in an instant, stumbling over her own feet. She violently smashed into the desk on her way over, and knocked everything off of it onto the ground apart from the very real, steel forged katana that she picked up amidst the scattered items, and immediately unsheathed. Then she wedged herself deep in the corner of the room, in an attempt to maximize the distance between the two of them, even if only by an extra few centimeters. Or more accurately, maximize the distance between Houki herself, and Ichika's spider.

Then she aimed the katana at the spider from several meters away, and focused her gaze on the thing like a laser.

"Oh?" Ichika broke the silence. "I thought you said you weren't scared of spiders."

Houki stared at him in disbelief.

"Ichika… kill that thing right this instant," she demanded. "I'm serious."

"Why?"

"What do you mean why?! Look at it!"

Ichika raised his bird eater and looked it dead in the eyes.

Then he looked back at Houki.

"What's the big deal?" he asked. "It isn't harmful to humans."

"Isn't harmful to…" Houki began, in total disbelief. "There is no way that thing isn't harmful to humans."

"It isn't though."

"I can see it's teeth from all the way over here. And I can hear it growling."

"Growling? I don't think spiders do that." Some probably did. But only when they wanted sex, Ichika was pretty sure.

"I don't care! I want that thing dead right now and as far away from me as possible!"

"What happened to not being afraid of spiders?"

"Ichika…" she began, frustration and terror clear in her voice. "There are spiders, and then there are monsters," she explained. "That thing in your hand is without a doubt the most frightening thing I have ever seen in my life. I didn't even know that spiders could get that big."

"I see," he said. It certainly was a beefy fellow, Ichika admitted to himself, seeing her point.

"So you would be fine if I brought a smaller spider instead?"

"No! I don't want any spiders in this room!"

"Not even small ones?"

"Rule of thumb?" She replied. "If I can hear it walk, it's too big!"

"But the smaller ones are usually more dangerous than the bigger ones," Ichika pointed out. "This one just has its size going for it. On the inside, it's a marshmallow and has a heart of gold."

"Why did you even bring it here?!"

"It's my solution to getting swarmed by all of our classmates every time we sit down in the cafeteria."

"I tried it out on Cecelia earlier," Ichika recounted. "And I gotta say… worked like a charm. She isn't going to be coming near me anytime soon I'll tell you what."

"You used that thing to scare away Cecelia?" Houki asked, a strange expression going across her face.

"Actually I used _this _thing to scare away Cecelia," Ichika emphasized, pulling out his second spider.

Houki didn't scream this time, but her focus switched over to the huntsman spider, and she nervously gulped.

"I put this guy right on the back of her hand," he said. "Should have heard her scream and take off after that. She was even louder than you. Probably blew out her vocal chords. And she nearly fainted."

"I have no doubt." Houki could easily imagine how effective that would be at scaring someone away, and she prayed to god that Ichika would never attempt that on her.

"But I'll tell you what," he said. "You clearly don't like these guys very much, so let's compromise." Ichika stared at Houki for a moment or two before a vicious glare went across his face.

A small amount of fear went through Houki's heart after seeing Ichika's expression.

"I hate people," Ichika claimed. "I hate almost everyone in this whole school with the exception of you and my sister. Everyone else can go die for all I care."

"I hate it when they all try to swarm around me," he continued. "So I will continue to bring these guys around with me to scare them off."

"So think of them like mosquito repellant," Ichika suggested. "I'll bring them with me in public, and then I'll put the spiders away once I come back here. Sound fair?"

"You aren't keeping them here in this room," Houki demanded. "I won't let you keep these monsters roaming free in here while I'm asleep."

"I figured you might say that," Ichika claimed. "That's why I brought this." Ichika went through his bag and pulled out an oddly shaped, four rotor electric drone as well as a pair of small containers.

Ichika placed the spiders inside these two containers, and latched said containers together. Then he hooked them up to the drone with a harness and then walked over towards the window.

Houki, wanting to stay as clear from the monsters as possible, moved to the other side of the room immediately to get out of Ichika's way.

Ichika opened the window of the room, pressed a button on the drone, and powered it up. The drone carrying the two giant spiders then whizzed out the window and into the night.

Houki stared at Ichika in disbelief for several moments after observing this all happen.

"Uh…" Houki began, lamely. "Did you just... fly those things away on a drone?"

"I did."

Houki didn't really know what to say to that. So she settled on asking a simple question.

"How do you know where they'll end up?" It didn't look like Ichika was piloting the drone remotely.

"The drone isn't remote controlled if that's what you're asking. It's hooked up to an online network and is flying them back to their artificial habitats at my house."

It had been a bitch to figure out how to slip a drone through the school's security perimeter, but Ichika had figured it out in the end. The school was mostly set up to protect against military grade equipment. So a tiny, singular drone equipped with stealth technology could get in and out relatively easily, provided that Ichika first hacked into the school network and fucked around with the system's database.

"The system is designed to automatically transport them wherever I need to. It's all automated, and knows what to do. So they are out of the room for now, and I'll bring them back tomorrow when I need 'em."

"Right!" Houki declared, with very fake enthusiasm lacing her tone. "Of course! Your spider transportation network, silly me. Of course you have one of those. I mean why wouldn't you?"

"Exactly, Houki," Ichika replied. "Now you're starting to understand why― and you're being sarcastic."

"What gave it away?"

"I know I said earlier that this generation could use more sarcasm, but I really only meant that you should be sarcastic to everybody but me, you know."

"Just… make sure I'm awake when you bring those things back." Houki didn't feel like getting into an argument about how insane Ichika was being. She never made any headway in those.

"Of course. I won't let them back into the room until you're up."

* * *

Houki had her legs curled up to her chest, as she sat in the darkness, on her bed, in the fetal position. She was still desperately trying to calm down her racing heart from seeing those… _things _that Ichika had brought into the room. And he had sent them away almost two hours ago. Ichika had even fallen asleep since then.

'_This will make things… difficult,' _she realized.

She liked Ichika. A lot. And she had known about this for a while. She had no intentions of admitting that aloud to him any time soon, but in her heart, she knew that this was true.

He could be really weird sometimes. And he had apparently gotten much, much weirder over the past few years in particular, but that was part of his appeal. She was in love with him, and she had it pretty bad.

But now Ichika planned on carrying those... _things _around with him?

Houki gulped nervously. This… would be a challenge. Those monsters served as a gigantic obstacle between the two of them now. Unless Houki could figure out how to either get Ichika to get rid of those things, or to get over her own fear of them, she'd never be able to get Ichika to understand her feelings. She wouldn't even be able to spend any time with him. Certainly not while they were in public, anyway.

And then there was that whole spiel of his about how much he hated other people. Houki had no idea what to think about that. Some part of her was happy about it. She had been worried that all of this attention from all the girls in the school would provide a massive amount of competition for her. Competition that she absolutely did not want by any means. So hearing about how Ichika wasn't interested in them, put this part of her at ease.

But the other part of her was worried about him now. He _really _didn't seem to like people. And Houki couldn't remember him ever acting like that. Not to this extent, anyways. He had always been antisocial, ever since they had been kids. But he had never expressed such hatred directly to her face. So that attitude must have been something that started within the past few years.

It made her wonder about what had happened. She had no idea about what could cause something like that.

Letting out a sigh, she gently tipped herself over onto her side in an attempt to fall asleep, still curled up like a ball.

She needed to figure this out.

Houki did not have a very good sleep that night at all.

* * *

Chifuyu looked up from her paperwork when she heard screaming from the hall outside. It sounded like dozens of girls were running for their lives.

"What the fuck…?"

Standing up, she stalked over towards the door and stepped outside. Her stare hardened as she started mentally preparing to face some sort of terrorist attack. Contingency plans started racing through her head as she rounded the corner to see what was going on.

Girls were screaming, and running away from something in terror. Nobody looked injured, however, so that was a good sign. Continuing forward, she eventually found the thing that caused it all.

She stared at the culprit in disbelief. Though there wasn't an ounce of such an emotion evident in her expression.

"Orimura… What are you doing?"

"Oh! Hey Orimura-sensei. You see, I'm just bringing these two fellows over to the front of the school."

"Why?"

"What do you mean?"

"Why did you bring those things here? Didn't I tell you that pets weren't allowed at school?"

"Of course! These aren't my pets though. I'd never break the school's rules."

"I see. So why do you have them?"

"They snuck through the window and fell into my lap."

Chifuyu's eyebrow twitched. That was the stupidest attempt at an excuse that she had ever heard. She could already see where this was going, though. Since she had denied her brother the right to bring any pets to school, he had clearly designed some sort of workaround to get around the rules. Wondering about how extensively Ichika had planned this scheme out, Chifuyu continued her line of questioning.

"So why didn't you kill them?"

"It's against my religion to do so."

"Against your… religion?" Out of all the things she had expected him to say, that had not been among them.

"Yes," Ichika confirmed. "You see, I'm a Jain."

"A... Jain?"

"Yes. A follower of Jainism."

"And when did you become a Jain exactly?"

"About four hours ago."

"I see," Chifuyu replied. "So what do the Jains believe that prevents you from killing those two spiders?"

"We believe that it is wrong to kill any living creature for any reason. As a result, I cannot bring myself to do so. You see I am absolutely… _paralyzed _by my pacifism. So rather than kill these two, I have decided to instead take them to the front of the school to release them into the wild."

"Don't you eat meat?" She was pretty sure that you couldn't claim to be a pacifist while doing so.

"Well, if you want to get technical… then I guess you could say that."

"I guess your pacifism doesn't extend all that far then, does it?" Just when it was convenient.

"It's a work in progress, I assure you," Ichika claimed.

The pair of spiders scrambled over Ichika's shoulders and one of them parked itself right on the top of his head.

"The front of the school is that way." Chifuyu pointed down the hall on her left, in the opposite direction that Ichika had been travelling in.

"I know," Ichika replied.

Seeing the eager grin on her brother's face, Chifuyu realized that there were additional layers to this plan of his. She pinched the bridge of her nose in irritation and continued her interrogation.

"You're going the wrong way," she pointed out.

"I'm taking the scenic route," he replied.

"There is no second route towards the front of the school if you go down that hall," she explained. "It's a dead end. If you go over there with the intention to end up at the front of the school, you will literally have to turn around and retrace your steps." She couldn't even imagine where her brother was taking this. It made no sense, and his explanations were full of holes.

"I know," Ichika replied, confidently.

"So why are you going that way then?" Chifuyu asked.

"Eh. I'm not in a rush."

"Why aren't you?"

"Should I be?"

It struck her in that moment. Her eyes widened as all the disjointed pieces clicked. She felt a headache coming on. She couldn't believe the amount of effort her brother had put into this. It was just so dumb.

Ichika intended to 'take the spiders outside,' but never actually get there. He intended to be in a perpetual state of transporting them to the front of the school and would always find himself 'distracted' in the off chance he ever got close to his claimed destination. That way he could effectively keep them at the school for as long as he wanted to, even if the rules declared otherwise.

Because the school didn't discriminate against religions, he could claim to be a pacifist and refuse to follow any orders given to him that went against his faith. So in the off-chance that a pair of horrifyingly gargantuan spiders just happened to fall into his lap from an open window, and if they just happened to cling on to him, by total coincidence of course, he would not kill them even if ordered to do so, and would even have a legal defence backing him up.

And if it just happened to be the case that all of his classmates would run screaming, too terrified to be anywhere near him as a result… then that was just something that Ichika would deal with.

Of course, it was completely obvious to her that Ichika was simply trying to spoon-feed bullshit to everybody around him, and that literally none of what he claimed was actually the truth. But he had covered his ass, legally speaking. At least partially.

It wasn't a bulletproof defence, though. Chifuyu could just order her little brother to hand them over so she could kill them herself.

She could claim that she would take them to the front of the school in his stead. And that would get around the entirety of his long-winded, meandering series of explanations, excuses, and verbal bullshit, just like that. Then Chifuyu would kill the spiders herself when Ichika wasn't looking.

But seeing the unwavering confidence on her brother's face made her second guess herself. Was there more to it than even that? How did Ichika intend to deal with that scenario? What was his plan if Chifuyu actually did simply grab those two giant, hairy bastards and squash them with her bare hands? Ichika couldn't hide behind his 'faith' if that happened, because he wouldn't be the one killing them. And that would leave his claimed pacifist nature intact.

So what was the plan then? Would he just acquire more of them? He could definitely afford to do that.

And _that _would be annoying, she realized, with widened eyes. If he smuggled in a new set every time his old ones got killed. It'd turn into an arms race. She'd try and stop him from smuggling new ones in, and he'd try and figure out new ways to continue doing so.

That really left her only one option. She'd just have to pull him aside and tell him, sincerely, to stop. She could put an end to the whole thing if she really wanted to just like that.

But she stopped herself just before she did this as another thought struck her. She carefully looked around the hallway and noticed the obvious. Nobody in the vicinity wanted anything to do with her brother anymore. In fact, the two of them were the only people still in the hallway. Everyone else had run off.

This idea of her brother's… when she looked past the absurdity of it, was clever. He had cleared out the entire hallway in a matter of seconds, non-violently, with something as simple as this. And this stayed her hand. Because she had just figured out what Ichika's ultimate aim was.

He had planned this. All of it. This entire confrontation had been going according to his script, all leading up to the decision that she would make in this moment. Ichika knew that this scheme wouldn't work without her approval, so he had needed to make it beneficial for her somehow, too. And Chifuyu had just now spotted the angle he had been going for, all along.

'_You clever little bastard.'_

"Orimura," she ordered.

"Yes?"

"Come with me."

"Yes, Orimura sensei." Ichika grinned.

* * *

Both of them sat down in Chifuyu's office once more.

"Have you been spying on me?" Chifuyu asked, cutting straight to the chase.

"What?" Ichika asked in an obviously fake tone. "Of course not."

"Ichika."

"Okay," he folded. "Maybe slightly. But I have only been looking at the material that the paparazzi that follows you around publishes themselves. They are the ones spying on you. I just look at the stuff they publish."

She grit her teeth in frustration. She _hated _those people.

"So you know all about my… _problem _then?" Chifuyu cringed when she said that word.

The number of men that tried to hit on her on a daily basis was astounding. She had no less than 500 stalkers from all over the world, all competing with each other to get with her. These were not simple fans that she was talking about. She had millions of those. These were the 500 fans that she had who were both absolutely determined to get with her, and who had the resources to fly around the world to follow her no matter where she went. Millionaires willing to spend all of their money to track her down and corner her. Fucking... fanatic, cultist worshippers.

Bars, grocery stores, formal outings, even when she simply decided to walk down the street she wouldn't be free of them. She had no doubt at all that there were cars parked at all exits of the school at that very moment with some of these men inside, waiting for her to leave the building. And they were willing to wait all day for her.

She could not go anywhere in public without dozens of them following her around. Most of them kept their distance whenever Chifuyu brought Maya with her, but when she was on her own, these people all became fanatically determined. It was the one problem she had that she had never managed to figure out how to completely solve on her own.

Killing them all wasn't something she could just _do _without consequences. She had tried using non-lethal force on them in the past… Breaking the bones of several of them, beating a bunch of them up, but annoyingly, after they had been hospitalized from these incidents and recovered, they came back even more determined than ever. As if her beating them up had simply turned them on. So that plan had failed.

Going to the police didn't help either. She had tried that too, hoping that they would do their jobs and take care of the problem for her. She didn't need protection from them whatsoever, as she could probably walk into any police station blindfolded, unarmed, with both hands tied behind her back, and still kill everyone inside in less than 60 seconds… But the police could stop these people without Chifuyu needing to go on a massacre herself.

If she tried to use lethal force on her own, then things might spiral out of her control if she didn't cover her tracks properly, or if she made a mistake. And she could end up having to go on the run if she did. Which was normally not an issue, as she knew exactly what she needed to do in order to completely vanish off-grid, but she'd have to abandon and cut off contact with Ichika to do it. And that was absolutely out of the question. She couldn't even risk that happening.

So she had tried going to the police, and it hadn't worked. Her stalkers were, for some reason, incredibly skilled at evading law enforcement. Some of them probably even had ties to them. So restraining orders and the justice system hadn't helped either. Not even slightly.

There was just no end to it. She was in this frustrating... _stalemate _situation with them. None of her stalkers would ever succeed in getting with her, but she also couldn't get them to leave her alone either. Not without risking her relationship with her brother, anyway.

A bunch of fat, greasy, horny, rich dudes were willing to go to the ends of the Earth to try and claim her and it was the most unconventional, _weirdest _problem she had ever found herself up against. As a result, she had yet to find a workable solution.

"I do," her brother admitted.

So her hunch was right, then. Even her brother knew about it. That was embarrassing. She had not wanted him to get anywhere near this problem of hers.

"Right. So how about you tell me exactly what your plan was with this stunt of yours." She was pretty sure that she already knew, which was why she had pulled him aside, but she wanted to hear it directly from him.

Ichika sighed.

"It was twofold. I wanted to get everyone in school to leave me alone. That part was true. But I also really wanted to be able to keep those spiders here. That way, whenever you had to go somewhere where certain unsavoury individuals who should be set on fire would be present, I could, coincidentally, '_have a business meeting overseas,'_ at the exact same time."

"A business meeting where spiders were not allowed to attend," he continued. "That way, I'd need a family member that I could trust to look after these two spiders of mine in my stead, you see. So then, in my hour of need, my benevolent big sister could step in and say: '_I'll look after your cute friends for a little while Ichika!'_ But since you also needed to go out somewhere at the same time, and since you couldn't avoid missing such an event, you would have no choice but to bring them with you."

"If going out in public with my two friends just _happened _to scare shitless a bunch of disgusting people, people who should die by the way, preferably in fire in case I haven't mentioned that part yet, then that was just too bad."

Chifuyu continued to stare at her brother in disbelief as he explained all of this.

"So, to summarize, you want me to _borrow_," Chifuyu emphasized with air quotes, "your spiders whenever I go out in public, to get the men who follow me around to leave me alone?"

"That was my thought process yes."

"A-and instead of telling me this directly," she internally cursed herself for the stutter, "you tried to demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy in-person first, at this school, to me personally, hoping that I would be more receptive to the idea after seeing it in action?"

"That is also accurate."

Chifuyu had no idea what else to say. She was speechless. This was the weirdest situation she had ever been in. The weirdest plan she had ever seen. And she couldn't wrap her mind around how her brother had come up with it. Or even why.

But... she could also imagine how effective it would actually be. Provided that those spiders didn't run off on their own, and weren't incredibly poisonous, and whatnot. That they were _trained_.

It might actually work.

Chifuyu's eyes widened a moment later when the true depth of this plan of Ichika's struck her.

Ichika… He had been planning this out for _years_.

_All _of those photos on the internet of him playing around with those spiders... He had taken all of those photos and allowed them to be published in the hopes that one day, years later, Chifuyu would agree to this exact plan. He had anticipated her one day having this problem in the future and had come up with this scheme to solve it.

Everyone knew that Ichika had spiders as pets. Well everyone that followed his presence online did, anyway. That meant that everyone who lusted after her, all of her stalkers, were bound to know about this detail as well. As they would have all done this research on her and her family in advance.

And the whole point of this plan of Ichika's was to give Chifuyu a believable excuse to tell them. She could genuinely agree to follow this crazy plan all while having a legitimate excuse. Whenever anyone asked her why she was carrying such disgusting creatures around with her, she could pretend to sigh in a 'what can you do' sort of way and explain how she had no choice but to look after them since they were her brother's and he was temporarily unable to do so himself. Because she was just that type of older sister who helped out her family like that. And they could confirm this excuse with a Google search.

All of this had been deliberately orchestrated by Ichika long in advance. Years in advance.

Once again, she had underestimated the sheer scale of the ridiculous plans that her brother conjured up just to try to help her out. And it made her wonder… just how many other crazy schemes was he working on?

After a few long moments of staring down her brother with an impassive face, Chifuyu, in an extremely rare show of weakness, broke eye contact and looked down at her desk. She cringed. Because she couldn't believe what she was about to say.

"A-alright."

Ichika immediately perked up, visibly.

Chifuyu wanted to get swallowed up by the Earth and die, in that moment.

"Alright?" Ichika parroted, "You mean…"

"Yeah," she confirmed. "It's a good idea. I'm surprised that you would go to such lengths for something like this." Chifuyu was willing to try anything at this point. Even embarrassing, over the top ideas like this one that reached into the realms of absurdity.

"They annoy you, don't they?" Ichika asked.

"Who? Those men? Yeah." Though perhaps 'annoy' is putting it lightly. If she could get away with it, she'd absolutely torture them all brutally until they died.

"That's reason enough to go this far," Ichika replied, in what he probably thought was a heroic sounding tone.

"Right. So… are they, I don't know, trained?" That question prompted the weirdest conversation she had ever had in her life. And that included all the ones she had had with her lunatic friend Tabane.

Ichika smiled, and explained to her how he had modified their behaviour. How he had _trained _them to follow basic instructions. And how to best make use of the creatures to scare people away.

"So what do you think?" Ichika asked, eagerly. "You want to give one of them a spin? You have somewhere you need to go today right? It's the perfect opportunity!"

Oh, she had somewhere to go alright. Straight to the bar so she could get herself hammered and forget all about this conversation.

Chifuyu sighed in resignation. Her brother really was the spitting image of Tabane.

"Fine."

"Awesome! Give this one a go!" Ichika put the Huntsman spider on the desk, and it crawled over to Chifuyu. It scurried up her arm and parked itself right on her right shoulder.

Chifuyu didn't so much as flinch.

Ichika grinned. The possibility of his big sister being scared of either of these two never even crossed his mind. She was way too invincible for such simple things to affect her.

Then, just when Chifuyu thought this wouldn't get any weirder, her brother proved her wrong.

"His name is Robert."

"Robert?" So they had names now?

"Yes. Robert Bartholomew Flapjack. The Giant Huntsman Spider."

Chifuyu decided right then that she was going to need something significantly stronger than beer, later.

* * *

**AN: I have no beta reader for this story. So there may be errors.**


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